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EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


NEW YORE + BOSTON «: CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CoO., Liantep 


LONDON * BOMBAY * CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lop. 
TORONTO 


, 
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\: 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN 
AGAIN 


BY 
PHILIP CABOT 


New York 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1925 


All rights reserved 


CopyRIGHT, 1924, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


’ Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1924. Reprinted 
March, September, 1925. 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY 
THE BERWICK & SMITH CO, 


PREFACE 


In the days of my hasty youth I was 
often admonished by my elders to “say 
it again, say it slow, and then whistle 
it’’—a gem of concentrated wisdom which 
I then characteristically classified with 
the other follies of old age and _ studi- 
ously disregarded. But now that I am 
myself grown old, I have fallen into line, 
as in the course of nature, and have 
adopted the advice which I was then too 
callow to understand. 

Repetition I now see is not always 
tiresome. The composer for example, 
develops his musical theme in the first 
movement and then proceeds in those 
that follow, to describe by means of vari- 
ations the full scope and significance of 


the theme with which he began. Far 
ivi] 


PREFACE 


from being bored by repetition of this 
kind, we are pleased and enlightened by 
it 

And so if the reader of these papers will 
take them in this fashion and assume 
that the experience described in the first 
chapter is the main theme, and the chap- 
ters which follow are the variations, or 
different aspects of one spiritual phe- 
nomenon, he may not find the repetitions 
intolerably boresome. 

It is doubtless true, that few men who 
had read all that had been previously 
written upon the subject would venture 
to write a book, for they would recognize 
that it had been exhausted by their pred- 
ecessors. But this piece of wisdom does 
not, I think, put a ban on the recording 
of personal experience. This is forever 
new. ‘Try he ever so earnestly, no man 
could possibly duplicate exactly the spir- 
itual experience of another, and there- 


Cvi J 


PREFACE 


fore there is one exception to the saying 


that, “there is nothing new under the 
sun’’—namely the soul of man, for this 


is ever a new marvel. 

The man who struggles to describe 
some aspect of this endless miracle is 
exempt from the ban, and he need have 
no fears of committing the sin of literary 
larceny; for he could not if he would. 


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TABLE OF CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
I. Tur CONVERSION OF A SINNER...... 1 


II. A Votcr CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS. 51 


Til, Answae or Ecuo. . 5). 00.00. a. 64 
IV. THe SLAVE oF FREEDOM............ 90 
V. Tur FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE........ 109 
Vit Ae SKILL, TO USB Soe iis oe. eme uh 126 
Vite DROKEN STRINGS Hi). ..).2 sds da er tae 143 
VIIL Tus Battie or Farm. :. 22... 3. 2.. 153 
IX. Mrractes AND MytTus............. 177 
X. Excerpt Ye Be Born AGaINn........ 190 


XI. Tur RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX......... 197 





EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


with 
’ ye 


Ant 





CHAPTER I 
THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


This is a record of personal experience. 
It is not a system of philosophy nor a 
theological creed. I make no pretense of 
proof of the beliefs I state because they 
are not conclusions reached by conscious 
logical mental processes. I think them 
true for me because they produce certain 
results; they give me more vitality and | 
power and a keener zest for life. They 
may not be true for any other man, but, 
unless I am wholly different from all 
other men, they must contain some 
truth or light for them. 

I begin with the story of another man.! 


1In order to make the story more typical, and also 
to avoid offense to any individual, I have made this a 
composite photograph of four men, taking character- 
istic incidents of my intercourse with them all. 


Cid 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


I knew him for several years only as 
we know our business associates, the men 
whom we see often at Directors’ and Ex- 
ecutive Committee meetings; a thin-faced, 
alert, courteous gentleman, with a deep 
wrinkle between the eyes and dark circles 

ainder them; a mind keen as a rapier, 
stored with knowledge of life and men, 
and illuminated with flashes of cynical 
humor. But it was not until I crossed 
the continent with him on a tour of 
corporation inspection that I saw the 
real man. KRevelation began on the 
train with his humorous side-thrust at 
my third volume of Gibbon’s “Decline 
and Fall,” which struck him, an up- 
state New Yorker, as typical of my Pu- 
ritan descent, and for long thereafter 
he used to greet me daily with the ques- 
tion, “Still Declining and Falling?” 
To which I had no apt repartee in view 


of the undoubted fact that I found the 
C2] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


volume of The Devil’s Paw, by E. Phillips 
Oppenheim, to which he was wedded, 
far more amusing. 

And then his game of bridge! It 
was of the fierce predatory type, for a 
high stake, which sent me “‘to the mat” 
in the second round, hopelessly out- 
classed. To miss a possible trick caused 
him a sharp pang, and he rarely did it. 
But I first caught him without his mask 
on a morning when, after a night in a 
small country hotel of Western Oregon, 
I saw him get out of bed — or, rather, 
the ghost of him. MHollow-eyed, with 
cheeks fallen in and a temper about as 
genial as that of a bald hornet, he offered 
no vestige of a salutation until, after 
bolting three cups of black coffee and 
cursing the bellboy because it was not 
strong enough, he was moved to say, 
“Cabot, I can remember the time when 
one cup of coffee with my breakfast 


C31] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


would set me up for the day. Now three 
on an empty stomach just bring my head 
above water.” 

That was the man without his mask, 
and I was shocked but hardly surprised to 
hear, three years later, that he was dead, 
having been killed by the overturning of 
his motor while running at the high speed. 
habitual to him. 

The incident was shocking but sur- 
prise was unwarranted, for the thing 
was not really an accident: it was im- 
plicit in his life. But ten years had 
elapsed before its full significance dawned 
upon me. Then, in that incident I saw 
myself and some millions of my fellow. 
countrymen mirrored to the life. It was 
really the picture of a man whose world 
was not “‘God’s perfect Universe,”’ but 
in sober fact, a Hell from which his 
craving to escape drove him to excitement 
in various forms, of which three cups of 


[4] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


black coffee before breakfast were per- 
haps the most effective and the least 
harmful. As with most powerful bus- 
iness men in America today, his busi- 
ness was not a trade nor an intellectual 
pursuit, but a game of wild excitement, 
played day and night, not for money 
or the advancement of knowledge or 
the benefit of mankind, but for the ex- 
citement of the game itself; and his so- 
called amusements — bridge, literature, 
and motoring — were mere variations | 
of the same thing. His whole life was 
one huge gamble — which he ultimately 
lost. 

The class to which he belonged is lim- 
ited but the morbid craving which drove 
him on can be seen onevery hand. Take, 
for example, the industrial worker. A 
large fraction of his time and all his sav- 
ings are spent on strikes which, in the 
last analysis, amount to a declaration 


C51 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


that his life, also, is in Hell and that he 
won’t stand it any longer. And this_ 
in the face of the fact that his material 
condition or “standard of living”’ is un- 
equaled in the world’s history. 

Nor is this condition confined to men. 
Their women folk, whose natural life is 
housekeeping, homemaking, and the care 
of their children, are on strike, too, de- 
claring such work to be “sordid and de- 
and seeking escape from it by 


> 


grading,’ 
every means in their power. 

All these human souls exhibit the same 
craving to escape from the slavery of 
their lives, and they have tried every 
form of excitement to satisfy their erav- 
ing, only to find that like all stimulants 
they make the craving worse. 

No one will deny that relaxation and 
amusement are necessary for us all; but, 
in order to see clearly the change which 
has taken place, compare our forms of 


C6] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


amusement with those of fifty years ago. 
In literature, painting, and music, the 
classics of our grandfathers are pro- 
nounced dull and slow today and things 
with “‘more snap to them” as we phrase 
it, have taken their place. Not beauty 
but excitement is what we crave, and 
this not alone in our sedentary relaxa- 
tions. In the out-of-doors world our 
grandfathers, of a Sunday afternoon or 
on week days, as opportunity offered, 
strolling in the woods and fields, acquired 
an intimacy with the trees, birds, and 
flowers, which they prized; or they 
hitched the fat old horse into the carryall, 
loaded in their children and women folk, 
and jogged along the quiet roads at an 
average of four miles an hour. Today the 
woods and fields are deserted, except for 
the hunter, strung with the thirst to kill, 
while ten million motor-cars whirl us 
at blinding speed, over crowded thorough- 


[7 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


fares on which we dodge our neighbors 
with incredible agility and fierce irrita- 
tion, returning home dazed and ex- 
hausted with a record of one hundred 
miles or so between luncheon and 
dinner. 

If these things be relaxing to the nerves 
and elevating to the spirit, human nature 
has changed indeed! They have the ear- 
marks of stimulants, not sedatives; of 
the fear of life rather than the love of it. 
Foreign observers have often remarked 
with a touch of humor that Americans 
work hard and hurry over their play. 
But this is not hurry; it is hysteria — a 
sort of spiritual madness. 

This is the condition of our world 
which all men recognized — all men, it 
seemed, except myself. Slower than most 
to see the obvious, I am, however, more 
impatient of a mystery. Most social 
phenomena have ascertainable cause or 


C81 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


origin. What is the origin of this uni- 
versal madness? 

Physicians and public-health author- 
ities do, it is true, report an increase in 
diseases of the nervous system, and 
deaths from heart disease. But the in- 
crease is not very great and is wholly in- 
sufficient to account for such a condition 
of mind as we see aboutus. For this con- 
dition is nation-wide; a large fraction of 
our population is affected; clearly this is 
not exactly a case for the doctors of med- 
icine. We must look elsewhere. Here are 
some straws that may show where the 
wind is. 


II 


A profound political observer is said 
to have remarked, many centuries ago, 
“He who believeth doth not make 
haste’; which, being interpreted, means 
that the man who has a clear purpose in 


[9 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


his life, and a firm grasp upon his work, is 
the master of it, not the sport of cirecum- 
stance, driven hither and yon by every 
change of wind. The man who is al- 
ways in a hurry is the slave of his 
work. 

A recent article by an eminent econ- 
omist in a well-known quarterly has de- 
veloped at some length the proposition 
that the mechanical devices which man 
has produced have now become so power- 
ful that they have taken command of his 
material world and made him their ser- 
vant and their slave. And this is true. 
Our machines do govern us; the material 
has overwhelmed the spiritual. The me- 
chanical genius of America has evolved 
the marvel of “quantity production,” by 
which wonderful combinations of ma- 
chines turn out their product with in- 
credible volume and cheapness. But the 
men who feed the machines do so at the 


[10] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


price of body and soul. The destruc- 
tion of these things which we cannot re- 
place is not included in the cost of pro- 
duction. Our captains of industry figure 
depreciation on their machines, but 
not on their men. If the depreciation on 
human souls were included in the cost, 
“quantity production”? would lose its 
charm for them, because it would not be 
cheap. 

Quantity production and “the do- 
minion of machines” are not, however, 
inventions of our Western world; they are 
expedients to which we have been forced 
by the drying up of the springs of our 
spiritual life. The workingman from 
whom the “joy of labor” has taken 
flight, has sought refuge in high living — 
which he miscalls a high standard of liv- 
ing and which involves high wages to 
support it. It is in the struggle to avoid a 


“labor cost”? so high that it would stop 
[11] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


production and reduce us to beggary 
that our complex mechanical and indus- 
trial system originated. The root cause 
is our spiritual poverty, and if Labor now 
suffers from the ‘“‘dominion of machines,” 
the fault lies at its own door. But, unless 
some remedy for this can be devised, our 
machines will wreck our civilization by 
destroying the race. 

And moreover it is clear that this pov- 
erty of spiritual life, or loss of Faith, is 
not confined to America. All Christen- 
dom is affected. For note well that the 
World War was not the special crime of 
any group of individuals, or of any one 
nation. Europe drifted into that war be- 
~ eause of lack of leadership among nations 
whose material resources and power had 
wholly outgrown their spiritual control. 
And the civilization of Europe today, | 
four years after the Armistice, is, accord- 
ing to the most competent observers, 


[12 J] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


upon the verge of collapse. Without 
Faith the nations perish. 

Here then perhaps we have our clue. 
The conditions which we see_around us 
are conditions of disease, and it is dis- 
ease of the soul rather than of the 
body. 

Look now at a concrete example. The 
conditions, material and spiritual, in our 
American world which drove my friend 
to his death, had driven me, after twenty- 
five years of battle, to the verge of it. 
My soul, like his, had for many years © 
been fed on stimulants and sawdust, 
and in a final revolt it wreaked its ven- 
geance upon my body, which soon went 
down in defeat. For eight years more, 
however, I refused to see it so; fought 
stubbornly against disease with all the 
weapons which medical science could 
provide, but without any real success. 
I contrived, it is true, to keep myself 


[13 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


alive by a system of fierce repression 
which required me to give up all the 
normal pleasures of life and almost 
all human society. But the achieve- 
ment was of more than doubtful value, 
so far as I can see, and was due more 
to the instinct to cling to mere life 
than to an intelligible purpose. 

In the summer of 1922 I became in- 
terested in considering the power and op- 
eration of the subconscious mind, and 
perceived how much more active, power- 
ful, and important its processes are than 
those of which we are conscious, known 
as intellect and will. The examples of 
the stone and the bicycle and of the 
six-inch plank in the floor vs. the six- 
inch girder on the skyscraper as foot- 
paths showed the superiority of the 
subconsciousness to the will; while the 
quest for the forgotten word demon- 
strated its faultless memory. The su- 


C14] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


perior quality in some persons of the 
thinking processes during sleep interested 
me because it was not true appar- 
ently of every one. Then I learned 
that some healers made their “‘sugges- 
tions” at night, and remembered that 
hypnotic influence was based upon a 
condition resembling sleep in the pa- 
tient. I read that M. Coué affirmed 
that cure by autosuggestion was highly 
effective; and that the suggestions should 
be made night and morning, and with- 
out effort of will. 

Of course, the reaction of the soul on 
the body (malignant or beneficent) had 
been observed and preached for two 
thousand years or more. In my own 
case, I found that if I instructed myself 
in spoken words, at night, just before go- 
ing to sleep, as to the problems to be 
dealt with and the pitfalls to be avoided 
on the next day, great improvement in 


[15 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


conduct and achievement could be pro- 
duced. 

After following this procedure for a 
short time, it came to me that what I 
was saying was tending to “degenerate”’ 
into prayer, a form of begging to which 
I had never fallen; and then, with a real 
shock, that the times of prayer from 
time immemorial had been morning and 
evening, the very times fixed by Coué for 
autosuggestion. Moreover, the method of 
Coué and the method of prayer taught 
by the Church were strikingly similar. 
Both rested their healing power on be- 
lief, conviction, faith—the surrender or 
subordination of the will being a first 
essential. 

It then came to me that from the time 
of Zeno, at least, men of spiritual insight 
had perceived and declared that God was 
within us; that the human soul was a 
part of God; and that it should be sought 

[16 J 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


and would be found within and not 
without. 

With these notions in my head, I 
looked curiously about me for evidence 
which would refute or support these 
assumptions, and this struck me as sig- 
nificant. As a whole, the American 
people appear to fair-minded outsiders 
to be remarkably unspiritual, material, 
practical — far more so than their an- 
cestors. In other words, the tendency 
of the nation — or, at least, of the upper 
classes — seemed to be toward mate- 
rialism, toward building up the mind 
at the expense of the soul. Such a 
process would result from starving the 
soul and feeding the mind, and if, as it 
seemed to me, the soul and the so-called 
subconsciousness were closely allied, or 
were one, it was of vital importance how 
men spent the last hours before sleep. 

Then the remarkable development and 


[17] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


spread of the American newspaper hit 
me, and I realized that although, a hun- 
dred years ago, good men read their Bi- 
bles before going to bed, today they read 
the newspaper, play bridge or billiards 
at the Club or after overeating at a 
friend’s house, and, in the morning, get 
up tired and cross and go to their city 
business. Obviously, if the soul is noc- 
turnal and has to be fed night and morn- 
ing, it is being fed on chaff, and the 
starvation or atrophy which our critics 
discern is exactly what we should ex- 
pect. | 

This idea was supported in my own 
case by great increase in calmness and 
poise following a change of routine which 
put the evening paper before supper 
and the Bible or its spiritual equivalent 
after. 

Toward the end of August, upon the 
verge of despair, I went up to my camp 


[18 J 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


in the Connecticut Valley for two weeks 
of so-called rest, taking along a liberal 
supply of the “very light” novels on 
which I was accustomed to feed, and, by 
accident, a little book on The Meaning 
of Prayer: which a dear friend had given 
me to read. 

It was August, the weather was rather 
hot and muggy, life looked very bleak, 
though fortunately not very long, for me, 
and the novels for a space went well. 
But after a few days even E. Phillips 
Oppenheim could not hold my attention, 
and one hot morning, throwing down 
the book in despair, my eye fell on The 
Meaning of Prayer. I began to browse 
on it with a vacant mind which rapidly 
changed to an absorption so complete 
that I was keenly annoyed by the arrival 
of lunch-time, three hours later. That 
afternoon I went back to Oppenheim 


1 By Harry Emerson Fosdick. 
[19 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


but, finding him intolerable, took up agam 
The Meaning of Prayer with a rather 
sheepish feeling to be reading such a 
book. The hours of the afternoon, how- 
ever, vanished as those of the morning, 
and supper was another unwelcome in- 
terruption — a remarkable fact for a 
man living on a starvation diet, in whom 
the pangs of hunger were never quenched. 

After supper I sat down to think. 
This thing looked serious. Here was I 
for the first time in my life bored with 
novels and absorbed in worship. Was 
this the first stage of conversion or the 
madness which precedes death? 


Ill 
After a few days of this sort, during 
which I experimented and examined 
my sensations with scientific coldness, 
I was convinced that I was not mad. 
Something different was in process. It 


[ 20] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


seemed that in worship, or prayer, and 
in my Bible, the solution to the riddle 
of my universe had been revealed to me; 
for I was living in a new world of peace, 
beauty, and gladness, such as I had never 
conceived. I was devouring the Sacred 
Books with the hunger of a starving man; 
the material world with its harassing 
duties, dangers, and excitements had 
faded on the horizon, and my wreck of 
a body (to maintain which in operation 
at all had been taking most of my time 
and all of my will power) seemed a 
wholly secondary matter which was look- 
ing after itself very well. 

That condition has continued except 
that I have returned to the world of men, 
taken up again my daily chores with the 
keenest interest and with a sureness of 
touch and an. absence of worry and ex- 
citement to which all my associates can 


testify, and my health has continued to 
[21] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


improve in a remarkable way. My ex- 
perience was, I think, a sort of “con- 
version,’ though not of the usual type; 
for subsequent reading has taught me 
that the sensations of genuine conver- 
sion of the explosive type, such as often 
occurs to those in middle life, are so ec- 
static and ineffable as to be beyond the 
power of man to describe. Certainly it 
has never been done. Adjective is piled 
on adjective, as Ossa on Pelion, but no 
clear picture results; and as to what 
might be called normal conversion, of 
the sort which comes to thousands during 
adolescence, it 1s apparently such an 
easy and painless process as to escape 
observation, and so descriptive analysis, 
in most cases. I conclude, therefore, that 
mine was not a genuine conversion, for 
the process was perfectly conscious and 
easily described. 

Sitting in my great cool living-room, 


[ 22 J 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


with the humming of the bees and the 
sound of the river in my ears; rowing 
on the river at sunrise; mowing my grass 
or weeding my garden, or even while put- 
ting on my boots, ideas would pop into 
my mind and automatically fit them- 
selves in with other ideas like the pieces 
of a picture puzzle. Sometimes they 
took places apparently without refer- 
ence to the ideas already there, and for 
days would hang in space, so to speak. 
But gradually the gaps were filled in 
and the picture became complete. 

At the time, the process seemed mi- 
raculous and J had the feeling of being 
controlled by an external power; but, as 
I was spending much time in reading the 
Bible, The Meaning of Prayer, Varieties 
of Religious Expertence, and other books 
on philosophy, I now see that the ideas 
gleaned from these books and sinking 
into my subconscious mind were simply 


[ 23 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


reappearing after the process of assimi- 
lation had reached a certain stage. My 
mind wandered very much, concentra- 
tion was never achieved, and it is cer- 
tain that no reasoning process produced 
the final result. It was mainly subcon- 
scious, but, by a gradual process extend- 
ing over some weeks, a clear picture was 
produced, the picture of the relation of 
my soul to all other souls, and thus to 
the Whole, the Infinite, or God — Who 
is the sum of all. 

I use the word picture and refer to it 
as “‘seen,”’ but it 1s a thing of feeling and 
not of a vision, a synthesis or harmony 
of the universe, which belongs rather in 
the realm of music. Life is like a great 
chorus in which each soul has its certain 
place. If it finds that place and fills it, 
it is happy and successful — it lives in 
Heaven; otherwise it is unhappy and 
lives in Hell. 


[24 1] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


~ Our modern world has its gains as well 
as its losses, and one of the gains is that 
it has accustomed us to miracles and we 
see them for what they are — merely as 
effects, of which we do not know the 
cause, but which produce results on which 
we can rely. My conversion, therefore, 
while miraculous, did not excite me, for 
even at first it seemed far more credible 
and normal than the atomic theory, 
for example, or electrical phenomena, 
such as alternating currents, telephones, 
and wireless; and, as I have examined at 
more leisure and with more thoroughness 
what took place, I think I see in it the 
normal working of cause and effect, based 
upon laws which are of twin birth with 
man; a part of the Law of the universe, 
but one which each of us must painfully 
rediscover for himself. The truth which 
has always been known had just dawned 
upon me, namely, that there is a material 


[25 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


body and a spiritual body; that the spirit- 
“ual body, in other words the soul, must 
be tended and fed as well as the material 
body, and that worship of God by prayer 
is the method by which it is fed. With- 
out such feeding it will die, and in my 
case a starved or ill-nourished soul had 
produced almost fatal reactions upon 
my body. The results, therefore, which 
we see on every hand, of feeding our 
souls on stimulants and sawdust, — 
namely, disease and death, — seem to 
me exactly what we should expect, and 
the miracles of healing by Christian faith 
are the normal working of cause and 
effect. For I take the heart of that faith 
to be that belief in God, shown by love 
and obedience to his will, gives men the 
power to draw strength and life from God. 

And there is another way of stating 
the same thing which I find useful. If 


I assume that God is Love, Goodness, 
[ 26 J] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


and Truth,— or, if you prefer, the 
Harmony of the universe, — I find that 
He is also Life. For Love, Goodness, 
and true ideas in the mind do, I find, give 
me vitality and working power. I find, 
for example, — and so do other men, — 
that worship revives and invigorates me, 
while anger, hatred, and jealousy ex- 
haust and depress. In short, God is 
Truth and Truth is Life, while sin and 
error are untruth and so “not Life.” 
So far as action is governed by fear or 
sin it tends to become automatic, a reflex 
from a false premise in the subconscious, 
and to that extent the soul has atrophied 
and died; while action based on true 
spiritual motives makes the soul more 
alert, that 1s, more alive. Sin is a per- 
version of the soul, like cancer in the cells 
of the body, and if not eradicated it will 
slowly eat its way through the whole 
structure and kill it. 


[27 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


The Christian faith, put at its very 
lowest, is a working-hypothesis like the 
Law of Gravity, the theories of elec- 
tricity, astronomy, and physics. In all 
these cases, if the hypothesis works, 
by explaining the facts we observe, 
we adopt and use it. These are acts 
of faith and appear to me more ques- 
tionable, far less supported by evidence 
and far more difficult to believe than 
the Christian’s faith in God. Our faith 
in God, in the power of His love, and in 
the life-giving results of obedience and 
surrender to His will, is supported by the 
whole history and experience of man. It 
has been tested and proved, not hundreds 
but literally millions of times. If evi- 
dence from experience can prove any- 
thing, it has proved this. It is really 
amazing what hard work we make of it. 
Men are skeptical about God, because 
they cannot see him. It is quite respect- 


[ 28 J 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


able to be so. But are they skeptical 
about an “alternating current,” or a 
telephone message, or an atom, because 
they cannot see it? They would not dare 
to say so. Times have changed. Five 
hundred years ago the position was ex- 
actly reversed. To confess skepticism 
about God would send a man to the 
stake, while all respectable persons 
thought Columbus was crazy and that of 
course the world was flat. Now we seem 
to be ruled by science and machinery. A 
man may be as skeptical as he will about 
the power of God, or what is far worse, 
may not bother his head about it in any 
least degree; but to question the atomic 
theory or the law of gravity or the justice 
of the prevailing industrial system will 
cause his neighbors to shake their heads. 

Today we deify the intellect and are 
skeptical about God; but the mystic of 


the Middle Ages was an example of 
[ 29 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


skepticism of another sort. We usually 
class as skeptics the men of high intel- 
ligence and learning who worship the 
‘mind and doubt the existence of God be- 
| cause the mind cannot grasp and express 
Him; while the mystic, seeing the proof 
of God in the whole universe about him, 
and the wisdom of yesterday proved the 
folly of today, was skeptical about the 
power of the intellect to grasp and de- 
scribe the Infinite, but believed in God 
because he saw His works. 

And, therefore, it is clear to me that 
the true remedy —in fact, the only 
one — for the ills from which we suffer 
is a revival of our faith in God. Our 
lives are torn to rags and tatters by 
the whirling nebule of disconnected ac- 
tivies which fill our days, resulting so 
often in a final explosion from the cen- 
trifugal forces generated by such rapid 
rotation. Vivid faith will centralize or 


[ 30 J 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


polarize our lives, giving them a central 
motive — the service of God — which 
will unify our efforts, making them more 
effective and relieving us of the killing 
strain of heterogeneous action. Faith | 
will construct for each of us the great | 
girders binding the rim of the wheel to 
its center, which will be strong enough 
to resist the pull of centrifugal forces 
and enable the machine to do its work. 

The miracles of science are “seen”’ 
by their results, which we accept with- 
out question. We believe them, we say, 
because they work. But does not our 
belief in God “‘work’’? I believe it to 
be the most dynamic thing in the world! 
It works more, and more powerfully, 
than all the works of man. Miaillions 
have put it to the test of experience and 
their lives testify to its truth. What 
more could be asked in God’s name or the 
Devil’s? No law of which we have any 


[31 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


conception is so completely and con- 
vineingly proved. No rational man, 
therefore, it seems to me, who will give 
his mind to it and will examine the evi- 
dence, can remain in doubt that God is 
the source of life and that by faith — 
that is, love and obedience to His will — 
man can draw life from that source. 
The reason that so many men doubt 
is because they have never looked at the 
evidence. It is time they did. 


IV 

But how shall we achieve and hold to 
our faith? Discussions of this problem 
are as old as man, being discoverable in 
the oldest books of the Bible, in the teach- 
ings of the Greek philosophers, in the 
Neo-Platonists, in the writings of the 
Fathers of the Church, and of all the 
mystics. But each generation prefers 
to restate its truths, and the discussion 


[32 J 


THE CONVERSOIN OF A SINNER 


best suited to the need of our times, as 
I see it, is in Hocking’s book, The Mean- 
ang of God in Human Experience. 

Briefly stated, what Hocking says is 
this. There is in this universe a God 
all-powerful and all-wise, and the ex- 
istence of man depends upon so regu- 
lating or tuning the individual life as 
to act in harmony with the divine plan. 
It is the will of God that man should 
devote much of his time in this world 
to accomplishing material work; but 
God’s universe is so devised that too 
great absorption in material ideas, as 
the result of which they come to be re- 
garded as ends in themselves, produces a 
subtle poison, or toxin, which saps man’s 
energy, makes these ends appear worth- 
less and thus deprives life of its zest. 
This is a necessary result of the fact 
that, man being human, all his efforts 
must contain a certain coefficient of 


[ 33 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


error which, if allowed to continue for 
too long a time without correction, 
will make his course wholly wrong and 
all his efforts futile. The way to correct 
the error, the antidote or antitoxin for 
the poison, is to set aside for a time all 
material work, and to concentrate at- 
tention on God, the spiritual center of 
the universe. Just as the sea captain; 
corrects his course by daily observations 
of the sun, the center of the solar system, 
sO man must correct his course at fre- 
quent intervals by transferring his at- 
tention to God by means of worship 
or prayer. After the corrections have 
been made — that is, after God has 
indicated to him his true course — 
man’s attention must be retransferred 
to the temporal world and its material 
duties. This transfer and retransfer is 
the principle of alternation so illumi- 


natingly stated in Hocking’s book. 
[34] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


It seems to me, therefore, that the 
method or technique by which this is 
accomplished must be the most impor- 
tant study of man; for in proportion to 
the completeness of his success in de- 
vising a method for real communion with 
God will be his power to tune his life in 
harmony with the Law of God, with 
the consequent ability to draw that 
vitality and power to make himself a 
useful servant, which is the purpose 
of life and the only source of happiness 
and success. 

Unfortunately, the human soul is the 
most lonely thing of which we can con- 
ceive. No “communion of souls” is 
possible in the deepest sense — only 
communion with God. No human soul 
can touch any other soul except through 
the medium of God, so that the method 
of communion or worship must be unique 
for each individual and he must discover 


[365 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


it for himself. -But there are certain 
general principles which are of universal 
validity and which are the foundation 
on which the individual may build. 
All are as old as man and antiquity is 
the proof of their validity. But mod- 
ern science has done much to explain 
their origin and force and should be ac- 
cepted for what it can give. The fact 
that. our material and mechanical dis- 
coveries may for the moment have over- 
whelmed us should not blind us to 
their value. An all-wise God has not 
willed these developments without a 
purpose. Our spiritual progress is tem- 
porarily in arrears, but the day will dawn 
when we shall have regained such spirit- 
ual mastery as will put these machines 
in their proper place. 

Now the practice of worship by prayer 
can be approached in many ways, and 
nothing is more striking, or at first 


[ 36 J 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


more baffling, than the different ways 
in which praying men approach it. One 
of the hindrances most often met with 
is the argument of those who think of 
prayer as asking for things, that a wise 
and loving God knows what we need 
before we ask for it, and will give us 
what is good for us. But we must re- ‘ 
member that in communion with God, 
as with individuals, “the question which 
has not been asked cannot be answered.”’ 
Until we are prepared to receive God’s 
gift, that is, until the thing we ask for 
has become a dominant desire of our 
lives, our prayer for it cannot be answered. 
We may pray for an understanding of 
God’s love, but until we have firmly 
grasped the meaning of the Command- 
ment “‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself,” and have an earnest desire 
to obey it, our prayer for the needful 
strength must go unanswered. 


[37 J] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


It is in this aspect of prayer that 
modern psychology can help us. From 
time immemorial men have prayed morn- 
ing and evening, and now we know the 
reason why. Most of our actions and 
all of the internal functions of our bodies 
_ are controlled, not by the intellect and 
the will, but by the subconscious. The 
' spring of action, whether in our daily 
judgments or in our digestive metabo- 
lism, is inaccessible to the intellect and 
the will except through the subconscious. 
The subconscious holds the key. We 
can, in fact we must, communicate 
with the subconscious through the in- 
tellect controlled by will; all action by 
the subconscious must originate in the 
conscious mind, but the conscious mind 
cannot control the act. It is to the ap- 
plication of this law that the miracles 
of healing by suggestion and faith are 
due, and moreover it has recently been 


[ 38 1] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


proved that there are what might be 
called tides in the subconscious; that 
is, that there are times at which it is 
nearer to the surface or more accessible 
than at others, and that for most people 
these times are morning and evening — 
the ancient times of prayer. 

The value of this principle in its ap- 
plication to prayer is this: in order to 
get our dominant desire made effective 
in our lives, we must use the subconscious; 
an important aspect of prayer is the 
clear and explicit instruction of the 
subconscious as to what we intend to 
be our dominant desire in order that it 
may be accomplished. I find, therefore, 
that for me an important part of the 
preparation for worship is the soliloquy, 
night and morning, in which I definitely 
instruct my subconscious as to the re- 
sults of my conscious thinking about my 


daily life. Before praying for grace to 
[ 39 1 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


love our neighbors we must first grasp 
what we mean by that, wherein we fail, 
and what is in fact our dominant desire 
about it. This desire we must clearly 
communicate to the subconscious to be 
made effective. Then our prayer for 
the needed grace can be and will be 
answered — but not before. 

And there is another way in which 
the new psychology has enlightened me. 
The great class of mental disorders from 
which men suffer, known as the phobias, 
can often, we are now told, be attacked 
successfully if the cause of the fear can 
be discovered. The destructive power 
of fear seems to be due to the fact 
that it originates in instinct and is not 
grasped by the mind. If the origin of 
the phobia can be dragged out into the 
sunlight of the mind, it loses its power 
and dies like the disease-germ when ex- 
posed to the sun. And this same prin- 


[ 40 J 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


ciple can be applied, I think, to our sins 
and false ideas, by soliloquy or prayer. 
Self-examination and confession are in 
fact the ancient application and use of 
this principle which we have just dis- 
covered. 

This is supported by what we know 

of the practice of the men who have made 
prayer the most powerful agent or work- 
ing force in their lives. ‘‘Chinese” 
Gordon, for example, writes, “‘ This morn- 
ing I dragged Agag out into the presence 
of the Lord and hacked him to pieces”? — 
Agag being used by him for a symbol of 
his own worldly ambitions. 
Of course, soliloquy of this sort is 
not exactly prayer; it is rather the prepa- 
ration for prayer by laying the founda- 
tion for a dominant desire, but such a 
dominant desire, expressed in the con- 
stant work of our lives, is a prerequi- 
site of worship and effective prayer. 


[41] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


I think we must admit that the ver- 
bal prayers of confession, humiliation, 
and self-abasement resemble soliloquy 
more than prayer, and they must be 
practised with discretion. For the sick 
soul to dwell upon its sickness is likely 
to make the sickness worse by concen- 
trating too much attention on it. Mind 
cure, or the religion of healthy-minded- 
ness, 1s most vital for the sick — which 
explains the well-known fact that only 
the very saintly should dwell upon their 
sins. But that such prayers may be 
very helpful and profoundly important 
is proved by the calming and cleansing 
reaction which they certainly produce, 
so that perhaps we ought not to be too 
critical in making an exact distinction. 

The miraculous cures that have been 
accomplished by the disciples of mind 
cure, Christian Science, and autosug- 
gestion seem to me to result from a 


[ 42 J] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


method which is in fact common to all 
of them, although it has been obscured by 
superficial differences which have been 
overemphasized. Each of them has de- 
veloped a formula or method by which 
the mind of the patient is concentrated 
on the conception of health, at times 
and in ways which successfully trans- 
fer this image to the seat of action in 
the subconscious. This concentration 
is the secret of their success, and I am 
tempted to believe that the miracles of 
healing of all times rest upon the same 
foundation. The simplest and perhaps 
most effective example is the formula 
of M. Coué repeated twenty times night 
and morning. 

Now it is impossible for me to doubt 
that if the same concentration can be 
achieved in Christian prayer, similar 
but more far-reaching curative results 


will be produced. I hold that the great 
[43 |] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


problem for each of us in developing 
the technique of prayer is to ascertain 
exactly by what method such concen- 
tration upon the symbols of his faith 
can be produced in his individual soul. 


Vv 


Our daily prayer, however, and the 
method of preparation for it, is not, 
I think, the most important form of 
worship by means of prayer. The deep- 
est form of worship is communion with 
God in order that our souls may be fed 
and the course of our lives directed in 
true accord with His will. For this 
the “seeing eye”’ and the “listening ear” 
must be developed by an utter con- 
centration of all our spiritual powers — 
which requires time. Silent attention, 
with every spiritual sense alert, is the 
attitude of the worshiper who would 


hear the word of God. 
[ 44] 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


In developing individual technique, 
the practice of the great mystics in their 
preparation for revelation furnishes some 
guidance. It was a process, occupying 
days or even weeks, by which the wor- 
shiper divested himself one by one of all 
his bodily and material desires and in- 
terests, using the intellect and the will 
to their uttermost limits, until, having 
eliminated every thought but the love of 
God, and with his whole personality con- 
centrated on that conception, he made 
the final leap, surrendering absolutely to 
the will of God and becoming merged in 
complete communion. Something of this 
sort must take place, I think, in every 
individual when, turning away from his 
material work, he seeks that alterna- 
tion, or communion with his God, which 
is necessary for his soul’s life. The 
method of preparation for this must be 
unique in every case. Some will find 


[45 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


the best environment in their church, 
as the greatest symbol of their spiritual 
life; some in the star-lit heavens; some 
in gazing at the blue or snow-capped 
mountain, outlined against the sky, or 
the lonely desert, or the endless sea. 
It was the habit of Jesus, when he prayed, 
to go into the wilderness. 

In the course of years, each man must 
learn, at the peril of his spiritual life, 
where and how best to develop the see- 
ing eye and the listening ear and, hav- 
ing done so, he must frequently sub- 
merge himself in these conditions and 
surrender himself to silent worship. Ob- 
viously, however, this is not a condi- 
tion of body and mind which can be at- 
tained by the worshiper in a few mo- 
ments or a few hours. It is on a wholly 
different plane from the level of our 
daily lives. This process of “alterna- 
tion,”’ vital as it is, takes so long a time 


[ 46 J 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


that it can be accomplished only at con- 
siderable intervals, and, for most men, 
can never become a part of their daily 
lives. The periods when we turn to God 
to adjust our spiritual courses must be 
systematic and periodic, but can hardly 
be daily. Such of us as are intended to 
do material rather than spiritual work 
must do it with such insight as our daily 
praying can afford, sustained and cor- 
rected at intervals more or less widely 
separated by periods of retirement and 
complete concentration on worship. Two 
things, therefore, become of vital import: 
that the technique of our daily prayer 
should be developed with such earnest- 
ness and intelligence as to make it as 
powerful as possible in the support and 
guidance of our daily work; and that 
_ the periodic “alternations” should be 
sacredly observed, adequately protected, 


and, by the use of the highest skill pos- 
[47 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


sible to us, rendered as fruitful as our 
spiritual power will permit. Special pe- 
riods must be set aside for them, with 
which nothing, not even illness, should 
interfere. In fact, if we fall ill such an 
alternation may prove to be the proper 
cure. 

As a nation we surely have the va- 
cation habit; men in all walks of life, 
even to the lowest, now take vacations 
liberally. But how do we spend them? 
Some of us alternate our city lives with 
a few weeks at a “summer resort,” 
where jazzing and the movies, with 
fireworks and violent exercise, consti- 
tute our “‘relaxations.”’ Others pack 
their wives and children into a motor- 
car, grasp the wheel, and proceed to 
tear off more miles per hour for more 
hours per day than any normal being 
ever before imagined. There are a fa- 
vored few who can retire to great and 


[ 48 J 


THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER 


beautiful country estates, and who do 
so for months on end. But even then 
they do not seek a revival and reorien- 
tation of the soul. The same round of 
material occupation goes on. We live 
in a burdensome luxury and in a whirl 
of social dissipation. The great Ameri- 
can country houses are as_ laborious 
to manage as a summer hotel. Such 
an environment is not the atmosphere 
of high spiritual life. | 
Something far removed from this must 
be devised. The wise old Roman Catho- 
lic Church has offered one solution. 
For laymen as well as for priests it pro- 
vides places of retreat: places of dig- 
nified and spiritual symbolism, to which 
the spiritually exhausted man may re- 
tire for a period of fasting and prayer, 
to cleanse and call home his spirit and 
prepare himself to serve again his God 
in the material world. Something of 


[ 49 J 


Panne. 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


this sort is obviously necessary for 
us all as a beginning, and from this 
each soul must build up for itself, with 
its highest skill and will-power, a method 
of cleansing and purification which shall 
make possible a true communion with 
God. 

Such a method of developing and feed- 
ing the spiritual body seems to me to 
be the cure for that disease of the soul 
from which I and many of my fellow men 
are suffering. It will, I think, cure the 
spiritual madness which IJ tried at the be- 
ginning to describe, and may enable us 
to save our tottering civilization by re- 
gaining control of the great scientific, 
mechanical, and industrial processes 
which have deprived us of liberty, the 
pursuit of happiness, and, almost, of life 
itself. 


[ 50] 


CHAPTER II 
A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS 


Fifteen or twenty years ago, three 


men, two Indians and a white man, 
sat on the steps of one of the Hudson 


Bay Company’s posts discussing the 
merits of a river in eastern Labrador 
as a route by which to reach the in- 
terior of the peninsula and the head 
waters of one of the great rivers which 
flow north into the Arctic Sea. The river 
was unmapped and little known except 
to the hunting Indians of the locality; 
none of these men had ever been there, 
but one of the Indians, an adventurous, 
voyageur type, had been with Low on 
some of his exploring and map-making 
expeditions and had heard of the river 
in question from other Indians. 


[51 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


The fact that it was unmapped and 
had its rise in the unmapped interior 
had a certain fascination for the white 
man, who played with the notion of 
exploring it, and probably talked about 
it on other occasions, so that it was 
not remarkable that a young and alert 
reporter for a New York magazine with 
sporting proclivities should have picked 
up the gossip. That done, it was only 
the natural working of cause and effect 
which sent him back to his boss in New 
York with a proposal to organize and 
equip an “expedition”’ to explore this 
river and win advertising and fame. 

The thing was done, and early the 
next summer the young journalist with 
two companions boarded the coasting 
steamer at St. Johns, N. F., bound for 
the starting point of the venture. Neither 
the journalist nor either of his compan- 


ions was peculiarly fitted for the task. 
[ 52 J 


A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS 


He had only the most amateurish know]l- 
edge of woodcraft gained in short hunting 
trip in “the States,’ and no skill what- 
ever in northern travel. His white com- 
panion was even less trained than he, 
and while the other was an Indian with 
some knowledge of northern hunting and 
travel, he came from the opposite side 
of the peninsula and the country to be 
explored was wholly strange to him. 

As if this were not handicap enough, 
the white men were both loaded with 
such unreasoning courage and such con- 
ceit of their own powers that they were 
impervious to all manner of advice. This 
appeared at the very outset, for as luck 
would have it, the white man who had 
first conceived the venture was on board 
the same steamer from St. Johns on his 
way to a more northern port. In con- 
versation with our adventurers he soon 


discovered the fact that while their 
[ 53 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


equipment was elaborate, heavy and 
expensive they lacked the most essential 
things and that their self-confidence was 
such that they would take no advice. 

They parted, with the deepest mis- 
givings on his part and none at all on 
theirs, and in the course of three months 
his worst misgivings were justified, for 
these self-confident men, disregarding 
the advice of the local people at the 
point where they left the steamer and 
failing to take any local guide, literally 
lost their way before they were out of 
sight of their point of departure. 

For weeks they proceeded to tear their 
way up streams of the most difficult 
character, staggering under inhuman loads 
of useless provision and equipment (much 
of which they eventually threw away) 
until they were caught and windbound 
on a lake in the interior by one of the 
autumn gales which are chronic in that 


[| 54 J] 


A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS 


latitude. The delay thus caused cost 
the leader of the expedition his life, 
for when the gale eventually released 
them and they sought safety from the 
oncoming winter in flight it was too late. 
They were trapped. The provisions 
ran low and, lacking the equipment 
necessary to deal with these conditions, 
they could not replenish them. Starva- 
tion and exhaustion followed, and the 
leader died in his tent a few miles 
from the place where he had left the 
shore. 

The incident was too common in 
the country where it occurred to excite 
more than a passing interest, and even 
I can easily imagine a manner of death, 
or even of life, far more terrible than 
death from exhaustion and _ starvation. 
But I tell the story because I think it 
may serve to startle from their sleep a 


class of city bred folk so habituated to 
[ 55 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


four meals a day and steam heated 
houses that they have forgotten that 
other conditions of life do really exist. 

Many similar examples could be found, 
but this one will serve as well as an- 
other to show what may happen toa 
bold but inexperienced young man whose 
overconfidence in himself leads him to 
fly in the face of the laws of nature. How 
bitterly this man must have repented, 
when it was too late, his disregard of 
the experiences of others! How deeply 
he must have longed for some man or 
God to save him from himself! Butt the 
event was in a world where no human 
help was available and where God does 
not violate His own laws to save man’s 
body from destruction. 

The significance of the incident for 
me is the way in which it illustrates 
and illuminates events of a similar char- 
acter in the spiritual world. I have 


[ 56 J 


A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS 


known other young men (myself among 
the rest) who set out upon life without « 
spiritual guide or compass and came 
to grief. 

But perhaps an even more common 
experience is iUlustrated by this inci- 
dent in my own early life. I was wan- 
dering and hunting in the Adirondacks 
one summer before I was twenty in a 
district unknown to me and without a 
guide. Leaving my camp to still-hunt 
one rainy morning I lost my way (which 
is an easy matter under those condi- 
tions) and became so thoroughly snarled 
up that although I had a perfectly good 
compass I refused to follow it, took a 
course opposite to what it indicated and 
as a result spent many hours in semi- 
hysterical bush-whacking which landed 
me at last at a point known to me but 
far distant from my camp, where I 


‘finally arrived in a sorry plight. 
[57 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


Many young men, I believe, start life 
with a sound spiritual compass, which 
they disobey as I did mine. Both those 
who have no compass and those who 
refuse to follow it come to grief, but there 
is this difference between the spiritual 
and the material world. The explorer 
in the snows of Labrador prayed for rescue 
and none came to him, while I in the wil- 
derness of my spiritual anarchy, prayed 
to an unseen God whom I had wantonly 
defied, and He came and saved my 
soul. 

Our schools and colleges are turning 
out every year many adventurous young 
men and women in whom intellectual 
overconfidence has bred a spiritual skep- 
ticism and a revolt against authority 
which will prove costly to them and to 
the nation. This crop of youthful skep- 
tics is in part the result of the failure 
of our methods of religious teaching. © 


[ 58 J 


A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS 


The scientist and the philosopher strive 
manfully to take the place of the priest, 
but they are doomed to fail. 

I turn aside to remark that these 
men, cool and perhaps a little inhuman 
by nature, but whose profession it is 
to teach very human boys, proceed by 
discipline and will power to dehumanize 
themselves still further; to divest them- 
selves of every stitch of humanity which 
they can peel off until they are as nearly 
as possible a bare idea or ideal. They 
live in the cold of space from which the 
heat of life has been removed and there 
they endeavor to teach the theory and 
practice of life to common men of flesh 
and blood who think not with their 
brain alone, but with hands, feet, stomach 
and heart—with their whole body, in 
fact. Such men cannot breathe the 
atmosphere in which the philosopher 
lives, and under such conditions it need 


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cause no surprise if they show signs of 
exhaustion as a result. 

The philosopher, for example, can 
deduce the idea of God as a “First 
Cause”’ from the recorded laws of the 
material universe. He can prove the 
necessity of such thing, but when he 
is done it is an zdea of God, a lifeless 
conception, which he has evoked, and 
not the Living God. There is no heat 
or motive power in it. No man can wor- 
ship a conception; your graven image 
is more inspiring. God the Father, 
the God of Love—this is the God to 
whom men pray in the watches of the 
night and the God who brings help to 
the wandering soul which yearns for Him. 
Such a God philosophy and science can- 
not find or create. He must be sought 
by another road. 

Agnosticism and skepticism are like 
infectious germ diseases, which seem to 


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A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS 


thrive in the rarefied air of philosophy 
and science, but which are destroyed 
by the sun and wind of vital living. 
Overprotected and _ overintellectualized 
men are most subject to them. The road 
from. skepticism to Faith is the road 
of life and experience. That must be 
your teacher; as in the case of the ex- 
plorer, to learn the secret of northern 
travel he must travel in the north. 
But let him not be overbold until he 
has learned his business. To face bare- 
handed an arctic winter armed to the 
teeth is a folly which may cost you your 
life and you will do well not to despise 
the wisdom of the Indians grown old 
in the locality. 

The human soul turned loose in the 
spiritual world with highly developed — 
intellectual powers and the confidence 
of youth very commonly finds itself 
lost in the wilderness, as our explorer 


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was, without guide, compass or adequate 
spiritual food, and after beating itself, 
as he did, against the eternal universal 
law, it falls exhausted and cries or prays 
for help—for some compass to guide it 
and some arm to protect. 

That is the road by which God must 
be sought and which will lead to Him. 
The knowledge of God, or Faith, begins 
with the yearning, the hunger, for Faith, 
which comes to the man who has tried 
to live without it and met defeat. Sooner 
or later every man above the level of 
the brute who has tried to live by his 
own unaided wisdom or even by the 
precepts of philosophy will be beaten 
to his knees in the struggle of life. Then 
and there his soul must either find a 
Living God or die. But in this world 
of the spirit, if he will cry aloud and 
admit his weakness he will find a res- 
cuing hand. God will not abandon 


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A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS 


him to his fate. Let him throw away 
his intellectual conceits and his critical 
sharpness and search with body, heart 
and soul. It is never so dark that, if he 
be earnest and patient, he will not at 
last hear the answering voice of his 
Father and feel his sustaining hand. 


[ 63 ] 


CHAPTER III 
ANSWER OR ECHO 


The human soul which has lost its 
way is in the same sort of predicament as 
a man groping in the dark or as one lost 
in the wilderness. He must be patient 
and expect hard knocks and many disap- 
pointments if he would win through; 
it is so also with the wandering soul. I 
realize, of course, that all souls do not go 
astray; some do not need to be rescued, 
and of those that do many will doubtless 
find salvation in ways which are unknown 
to me. All that I know is my own ex- 
perience which I shall try to report ac- 
curately and clearly in the humble faith 
that if I succeed others in similar case 
may profit. 

To most men in the modern world the 


[ 64] 


ANSWER OR ECHO 


experience of being lost in the woods or 
in the desert has never come, and I trust 


it never will, for it is a fearful thing—The 
terror that grips the heart when you 
have lost your way in some vast wilder- 
ness and stand face to face with death 
for the first time is a savage thing. Panic 
will then overwhelm you like a flood; 
you will know desperation and a wild 
unreasoning fear. 

Most of you, I repeat, in your protected 
lives, will never know it in the material 
world. But in the spiritual world most, 
perhaps all, of | you will know it, for if 
in your inexperience you try to guide 
your lives by your own unaided wisdom 
without some spiritual compass you will 
inevitably lose your way. No parental 
care and no human guidance can protect 
you from it, and the day will come, per- 
haps as the result of some accident or 
some great personal loss when you will 


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be “knocked endwise,” as the slang 
phrase goes. When you try to pick up 
the pieces and start life again you will 
find that you can’t. You are lost in the 
wilderness! terror will seize you by the 
throat, and you will fall upon your knees 
and cry desperately for help. 

If your cry is heartfelt; if you have 
been thoroughly beaten and sufficiently 
humbled to make your surrender com- 
plete, your cry will be answered. No 
human soul ever uttered the genuine 
call to God for help and went unanswered. 
Be sure of that! An answer will come if 
your call is earnest. “‘Seek and ye shall 
find. Knock and it shall be opened unto 
you.” 

But what will be the nature of the 
answer? The only reply I can give you, 
out of my own experience, will be to ap- 
peal again to the world of nature which I 


know. Most of you are city folk, to 
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ANSWER OR ECHO 


whom the silence and the wonder of the 
wilderness at night are strange. But 
I know that world well. I have spent 
many a night on the lakes and barrens 
of the north listening for the faintest 
sound that the ear can catch. I prac- 
tised often and acquired skill in the art 
of “‘calling” moose at night. The “call” 
is made on a birchbark horn (like a 
megaphone) in imitation of the lowing 
of the cow moose. It can only succeed 
when no breath of wind is stirring and 
only in the autumn months. In order 
that the “call”’ may carry far, it is usual 
to take your canoe to the middle of a 
lake (after the sun and wind have gone 
to bed) and spend the night there. The 
hunter “calls”? about twice an hour and 
then listens with intense alertness to 
every sound. He will hear an owl hoot 
miles away, and a deer walking on the 


game trail, or a dead tree fall with a 
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crash; perhaps a bear may wander across 
the hillside or a wolf howl to his friend; 
and strange little puffs of wind will arise 
suddenly on the mountain side and as 
suddenly die away. All these sounds he 
notes but disregards. ‘They are not the 
sound he seeks. And then, if you are 
fortunate, after hours of listening you 
may hear the answer to your call. It 
will be very faint at first and you will 
often doubt its reality; for it is like the 
faintest echo of your call, and only by 
intense concentration can you be sure of 
it. An owl or a wolf at a great distance, 
or a porcupine on the shore very near 
you grunting like a meditative pig, will 
be almost indistinguishable. Almost— 
but not quite. The trained ear can de- 
tect the difference. 

I would gladly elaborate this theme 
but lest I wander too far afield, I must 
trust you to understand from these few 


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ANSWER OR ECHO 


hints the symbol which makes most 
vivid to me the answer which God will 
give to the lost soul that cries to Him for 
help. You have often heard the phrase, 
“the still small voice.” That is the sort 
of answer which I am trying to describe 
to you. 

But how shall you know that the thing 
you hear is the voice of God and not of 
some demon? ‘This is how you will know! 
If you mean business and if you listen 
and observe intelligently, you will feel 
a sympathetic vibration in your own soul 
to the voice of its Father. It is like the 
musical harmonic or overtone; a string 
in your own soul will vibrate in response 
to the answer of your God. It will be 
faint but unmistakable. No true pen- 
itent will long remain in doubt. You 
will know you have been answered be- 
cause the whole framework of you will 
be set a-vibrating. 


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You can not doubt this if you are a 
Christian or believe in God at all, for 
you can form no image of your own soul 
except as a part of God. It is of the same 
essence. You have the clear statement of 
Jesus that each of us is the son of God. 
That is why the voice of God will set up 
a sympathetic vibration within you. 
Your soul is like one string of the mighty 
harp, the whole of which is God. 

But the harmonic will sound faintly 
at first and will always remain a mys- 
terious, fairy thing, which will easily 
elude you. Desperately you will long 
to bring it nearer—you will yearn to 
“see the face of God.”’ 

There you come to grips with the most 
important and the most difficult task in 
life. It is one which you must achieve or 
die and yet it is a battle in which man 
can give you little aid. You must win 


through alone, but these suggestions may 
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ANSWER OR ECHO 


help you. Follow your feeling or instinct, 
more than your reason. For example, 
we all know that when we get up at 
night in a dark room and try to find our 
way to the door we can go straight to it 
if we don’t think. Just follow your im- 
pulse and you will get there all right. 
But if you stop to reason you'll run into 
a table or an armchair or hit the fire- 
place instead of the door. Remember 
that in your search for God; your instinct 
is older than your reason and wiser. 
“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart 
and lean not on thine own understand- 
ing.”’ Proverbs i: 5. 

Another suggestion about your method, 
or listening technique, is to relax. Throw 
yourself into the arms of God. Rigidness 
or nervous tension will stop your ears. 
Returning to my former simile, any 
hunter can tell you that in listening for 
game sounds by day or night you must 


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EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


be at once relaxed and concentrated. 
Overanxiety will fill your ears with 
imaginary noises; lack of concentration 
will degenerate into drowsiness. To the 
hunter listening for moose both are alike 
fatal to suecess.! So also with the soul, 
when listening for the “still small voice.” 
You must be completely relaxed but not 
drowsy, perfectly intent, but with an 
open, almost vacant mind. Lying flat 
upon your bed without a pillow in the 
early dawn is a method in common use; 
and many of us find help in a “listening 
place”? or sanctuary consecrated to the 
practices of worship. 

In preparing the soul for worship, the 
beauty of the natural world is priceless. 
All of you have seen the face of a friend 
lit up by the scent of a flower or felt the 


1 Tt is the same with the eye strained to distinguish a 
distant object. If the eye muscles become rigid the 
eye will not focus. 


[724 


ANSWER OR ECHO 


inspiration of a sunset or of the star-lit 
sky. It is not an accident that prophetic 
inspiration has been most common in 
desert lands where men lived much under 
the open heavens, for such conditions 
unquestionably help to tune the soul to 
the voice of its Father. 

These suggestions may help you to 
hear the voice of God answering your 
prayer. But it will remain faint and dis- 
tant, your yearning “‘to see the face of 
God’’ will be unappeased and many of 
you will long as I do to bring nearer the 
God whose answer you have heard, so 
that your worship may burn like a cen- 
tral fire from which you can draw the 
powers to joy and service. 

As I have said, I believe that our faith 
in God grows out of the craving for Him 
which men feel most keenly after they 
have tried to manage their lives without 


Him and have failed. When beaten 
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down by anxiety, surrounded by the 
ghosts of fear, and unable to see through 
the clouds that hide the future, the con- 
viction of his own feebleness comes to a 
man he then begins to feel a hunger for 
God which will at last crystalize into belief 
in Him. 

Just how to distinguish this yearning 
and this faith from what is called the 
Love of God, or perhaps more properly 
how to connect it with the Love of God, 
is not easily discernible for me. But I 
find in the writings of a modern Spaniard 
much that is illuminating to my igno- 
rance. According to his view, pity and 
charity towards other men begin with 
the experience of pain in ourselves. 
When this reaches the point of “anguish 
of the spirit”’ it overflows towards others 
and there starts a process of growth by 
which at last we learn to know the love 
of God. From suffering agony ourselves 


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ANSWER OR ECHO 


we gain the power to suffer with others— 
that 1s, to sympathize with them—whence 
we move up to a true vision of the hard- 
ships in other lives, which leads to charity 
in thought and act, and so on to love of 
humanity and the sense of God’s love 
for us. This process of growth is clear 
and normal, and the man who has thus 
attained the power to love his fellow men 
will have more than a clue to the Love 
of God for man. A man who can love 
mankind can surely grasp the fact of 
God’s love, for what is possible for man 
must be possible for God. 

This explanation may throw light for 
some of you, as it has for me, on the way 
in which our longing for God grows into 
love of Him, but it is a mystic process 
which we can more easily feel than de- 
scribe. This, however, is clear to me. 
When you have felt the need of a God 
and have cried out or prayed to Him for 


C75 J 


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help you will hear an answering voice. 
At first it will be faint, and there will be 
moments when you feel that it is only 
the echo of your own cry; a mocking echo 
in a desolate world. But such moods 
pass. You will hear the voice again, if 
you listen for it. You will want to “see 
the face of God”’ and feel His arm around 
you; in other words, you will yearn to 
personalize your God. All men feel that 
they must do this, for human feeling is 
personal, and our Faith in God, which is 
our highest feeling, must be personal too. 
Our faith in God is of the same nature as 
our faith in our friends, raised to the 
“nth” power, so to speak. 

It is in this effort to personalize, or 
mersonify, God that most of us fail, and 
when we have failed our faith grows dim 
and cold. It no longer warms us and 
helps us to do our work. 

We sometimes suppose that there is 


[76 


ANSWER OR ECHO 


more faith in the East than in the West, 
and look in that direction for help. But 
we shall not get it there, for if faith comes 
more easily to the Oriental, it is because 
the East does not want to personalize; 
it prefers to remain mystic. The men of 
the East lose interest and faith in a 
thing when you begin to make it clear to 
them. They distrust things that are 
clear; they prefer them misty or mystic. 

But for us, things must be clear! We 
must personalize God or lose the vision 
of Him. And surely it can be done, for 
even the philosopher endows his zdea of 
God with personality. It is, however, “‘a 
hard quicksand crossing,’ as the cow- 
boys say, at which many of us are lost; 
but in God’s name make a dash at it and 
either sink or swim. And make the dash 
while you are young; while you still have 
vitality and the spirit of adventure. 
Don’t wait until you are my age and too 


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feeble to win through. Faith in God is a 
great adventure and can only be attained 
by adventurous people; that is by those 


who are spiritually young. 
You can see the same craving which we 


all feel, in Philip’s demand of Jesus, 
“Lord show us the Father.” It is the 
craving of all mankind. But it is written, 
““No man may see the face of God and 
live,” and this I believe in spite of the 
assertion of Job, “Now mine eye seeth 
Thee” (Job 42-5). For the book of Job 
is very ancient. We are not too sure of 
the accuracy of the translation; and I 
suspect that the God whose face Job 
thought he saw was not the God whom 
Jesus called the Father. 

When I try to see the face of my God 
I end in mere vagueness for God is a 
spirit embodying all the best qualities 
in man raised to infinity, and infinity I 


cannot grasp. I am told by the philoso- 
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ANSWER OR ECHO 


phers that this distinction between finite 
and infinite is a false one; that we are all 
infinite. But the man in the street knows 
better. There is a distinction for him 
between the degrees of magnitude which 
his mind can grasp and those which are 
beyond it. That is the practical line of 
division between the finite and infinite. 
The point of division will vary with the 
individual, but the distinction is real. 
And so with God, he is infinite; I cannot 
see His face, but I must have some way 
to symbolize or personify it. Otherwise 
it will vanish. What am I to do? 

If this human craving must remain 
unsatisfied we should expect Jesus to 
have rebuked Philip for his curiosity. 
The ancient Prophets and wise men 
would have been forced to do so, because 
they could have given no satisfactory 
answer, and it is one of the proofs of the 
supremacy of Jesus as a prophet of God, 


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that he could meet that issue. You 
remember his answer? ‘“‘He who hath 
seen me hath seen the Father,” and again, 
“T am in the Father and the Father in 
me.” 

These and many similar sayings in the 
Gospels throw a flood of light upon this 
dark problem, and force.me to conclude 
that until we can honestly say that we 
know Jesus we have no right to complain 
that God has hidden his face from us. 
And yet it is incredible how little we know 
Jesus and how little we have tried to 
know Him. 

Many of us call ourselves Christians, 
but just what do we mean by that? What 
is it to be a Christian? Sometimes it is 
asserted that to be a Christian is to know 
and practice the teachings of Christ. If 
that be the test there are no Christians. 
It is too hard, for to do so would require 
that we be saints, and very saintly saints 


[ 80 J 


ANSWER OR ECHO 


at that. We must set the standard lower 
or abandon the Christian faith. Is it 
too much, however, to ask that we should 
know Christ, or at least make an effort 
to know Him? I say it is not, though very 
few of us have ever done it. I never have, 
and I find even among our ministers many 
who have not. 

I happened, not long ago, to meet a 
minister, highly placed in his church, 
with whom I had some acquaintance, and 
observing that he seemed nervous and 
harassed I asked him the cause. He 
admitted that he was harassed and pro- 
ceeded to unfold a world filled with worry 
and fear. It seemed that the preparation 
and delivery of his sermons exhausted 
him very much; that at home he had a 
crop of vigorous and noisy children who 
made it impossible for him to rest, and 
that although he had a salary which 
would have seemed princely a few years 


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ago he was constantly worried about 
money. ‘The natural varieties of feeling 
and opinion among the members of his 
congregation irritated and alarmed him; 
and if any member of the parish devel- 
oped strong and progressive views they 
frightened him. This man was a Chris- 
tian minister chosen to teach the Gospel 
according to Christ, but did he know it? 
Whence came his financial worries if he 
had mastered in their modern application 
the teachings of Jesus about property? 
Why should he have been worn out by 
preaching the word of God if he was 
permeated by His spirit? How could 
jealousy find any place in the heart of a 
true servant of Christ? I cannot answer 
these questions without arriving at the 
conclusion that this man did not know 
Christ or His teaching and that he had 
not mastered the practice of prayer. 


He is not an isolated example even 
[82 J 


ANSWER OR ECHO 


among the ministers and of the rest of us 
he can be taken almost as a type. Are 
we to be driven, then, to the terrible 
conclusion that to be Christians is im- 
possible for us; that we can never know 
Christ, and so can never see God? 

To this I say fiercely, No. We can 
know Christ and we can see God. But 
we haven’t tried. In fact, I go much 
farther, for I believe that we can know 
Christ better than we can know any living 
man. ‘Take yourself, for example. You 
know yourself better than you know (or 
ean know) any other human being, for 
what you know about others must always 
be deduced from what you know of 
yourself. You can only see in another 
man what you have first seen or felt in 
yourself. But sincerity will force you 
to admit that what you know about 
yourself is very limited. You may be 


able to say what you think today and 
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what you will do today. But about to- 
morrow or next year? You cannot tell. 
For you are in a state of continual growth 
or change. What you do today is the 
result of what you are today. What 
you will do next year will be the result 
of what you are next year, and that you 
do not know. Certainly, it will be some- 
thing different from what you are now. 

And if this is true of your knowledge 
of yourself, it is doubly true of your 
knowledge of others. The greatest men 
are those who grow and change the most, 
and of living men it is literally true that 
those of whom we want to know the most 
we do in fact know the least, so that I 
think we shall be forced to admit that 
our knowledge of all living men is very 
unstable and incomplete. And yet it is 
far greater than our knowledge of Jesus. 
In fact we hardly know Him at all, for 
we have made no effort to know Him. 


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ANSWER OR ECHO 


But we should do well to make that effort, 
even if, for a time, we were forced to 
abandon all other work. We should do 
well to give up our pastimes and our busi- 
ness to it for there is no other knowledge 
which we require so urgently or which will 
benefit us more in the material world. 
Without any exaggeration, it may be said 
that for every one of us this would be 
the most profitable work that he could do. 

It is commonly assumed, I think, that 
to know Christ intimately is a difficult 
and (for all but a rare minority) an impos- 
sible thing; that only men with inspired 
vision can know the character of Christ 
so as to make Him a vivid personality; 
and so we study his teachings and not his 
character. But I challenge that assump- 
tion. I say it is not only erroneous but 
that the truth is exactly opposite. Using 
the phrase, “to know Christ” in the 
sense in which we say we know Bishop 


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Lawrence, I say that we can know Christ 
better than we can know any living man. 
For living men, as I have said, are grow- 
ing, changing men, about whom nothing 
absolute and final can be known; while 
it is one of the most miraculous things 
which Christ did—I think his greatest 
miracle—that he has left with us in this 
world a personality finished and perfect 
which, if we choose, we can know. Some 
among us are skeptical about many mir- 
acles which Christ is reported to have 
performed, but here is a miracle which no 
one can doubt. The true character of 
Jesus 7s a fact that each one of us can 
verify for himself; each one of us can 
read the record and can see this miracu- 
lous personality for ourselves. Christ is 
personalized and personified for us, and 
if we believe His words, ““He that hath 
seen me hath seen the Father,’ we must 


know His personality and see Him be- 
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ANSWER OR ECHO 


fore we can have any chance of seeing 
God. 

I am not unmindful of the difficulties 
which haunt the road, but they can be 
overcome. It is true that the records 
which remain to us of His life and teach- 
ing were written down many years after 
His death and are very incomplete. But 
in spite of that it is a miraculous picture 
which, if studied with the attention which 
men accord to any business problem, for 
example, will yield’ a rich reward. The 
record to be searched is not the record 
of the four Gospels, the Acts and the 
Epistles only, but the record left by in- 
spired men of later times who have known 
the personality of Christ. What they 
found in the record of the Gospels and 
the image or personality of Christ which 
they worked out are a part of the record 
for us. 


The number of Lives of Christ which 
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have been written is staggering, but we 
are in urgent need of another; for each 
generation needs a new Life of Christ 
to bring the record down to date and 
state it in the language and symbolism 
of a new time. I pause to remark that 
the latest Life of Christ, the much ad- 
vertised Life by Papini, will not help you. 
This man did not know Christ. The 
book radiates hatred and passion instead 
of love. 

But before we can read any Life with 
profit each one of us must write one for 
himself. Each one of us must go back to 
the New Testament and master the rec- 
ord there set down. When we have done 
this, and only then, shall we be able to 
read a Life of Christ written in our own 
day and get much out of it. For in this, 
as in other affairs, we get out what we 
put in and we must put in the results of 
our own patient and penetrating study 


[88 J 


ANSWER OR ECHO 


ef the old record before we can take a 
profit out of the new. 

But if we have the will to do this we 
can, and we shall obtain a knowledge 
of the character of Christ more accurate 
and final than of any living man. We 
ean, I believe, attain such knowledge as 
will enable us to say what Christ would 
have done under any set of conditions 
which now confronts us. This we cannot 
do with any living man, but we can do it 
with Christ, and when we have we shall 
have seen the face of God. 


[89 J 


CHAPTER IV 
THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM 


In the previous chapters I have aimed 
to sketch how faith in God was, so to 
speak, forced upon me and made a 
vital and controlling force by the expe- 
riences of life. To state it in one sentence, 
I tried to live without it, was forced to 
admit my failure and learned by that 
painful process the vital principle of life. 
But if I look back thirty years, and ask 
myself whether I should have acted differ- 
ently if I had read then what I have 
written now, I am disposed to doubt it. 
If someone had told me in a rambling 
fashion how faith in God had come to 
him and how he had known that the 
answer to his cry for help was the voice 
of God and not the voice of the Devil; 


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THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM 


and of his yearning to see the face of God, 
his inability to do it and how he had been 
able in part to appease that longing— 
what effect would it have produced on 
my mind? The only honest answer I 
can make to those questions is that I 
should have listened to his chatter, with 
such courtesy as I could command, and 
held my peace. But I should have been 
bored by it. Such talk would have been 
remote from the world in which I was 
living; I should not have felt any urgent 
need for the good advice which he was 
thrusting upon me; and [I should have 
forgotten his remarks as soon as I left 
the room. What possible use could such 
ideas have for me? Suppose I did acquire 
a faith in God such as he described, what 
should I do with it? What use was such 
a thing to me? Many of you must be 
consciously or subconsciously in just 


that state of mind. What good will a 
[91] 


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belief in a liwing—personal—God do you? 
You are very comfortable as you are. 
You have all you want to eat, all the 
clothes you need and before you the 
prospect of an adventurous and happy 
life. Why then fuss about these vague, 
intangible and apparently difficult con- 
ceptions which promise to bring you 
more pain than pleasure? You feel very 
well satisfied with the life that you are 
living. Why not leave well enough 
alone? . 
That is what many of you must be 
feeling; it is the attitude of the people 
around you and of the society in which 
you live and it is just exactly what I felt 
when I was young. I acted on that con- 
viction and one of the things (perhaps the 
only thing) which I can now do for you 
is to tell you how that course of action 
worked in my case, and how it will work 
in yours. For in this instance it is not 


[ 92] 


THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM 


true, as you are told so often, that the 
experience of each individual will be 
different. The result of such a course of 
action will be the same in every case, for 
this is part of the law of the universe, 
a law of God; the same cause will always 
produce the same effect, and there is 
nothing in the world of which I am more 
sure than that every single person who 
takes the course which I took will reach 
the same result. 

I acted upon the theory that I could 
manage my own life; that free will had 
been given to me to use; and that the 
guiding hand of a living God which might 
be useful to weaker souls, was something 
which I could get along without. The 
result in my case was disease of the body 
and atrophy of the soul, and I say to you 
with profound conviction that if you 
take the same road you will reach the 
same destination. 


[93 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


I had to learn by bitter experience the 
simple and time honored truth that there 
is a distinction between freedom and 
license; that there is no such thing as 
absolute freedom, “Obedience to Law 
is Liberty.” Unrestrained freedom is 
anarchy; and anarchy is not freedom, 
but the worst form of slavery—the slav- 
ery to your own passions and whims. 
Until you have surrendered some free- 
dom you will have none, and in the spirit- 
ual world you will have no freedom and 
no happiness until you have subordinated 
your will to the will of God. That such 
a surrender does not deprive you of free 
will, I shall later try to show, but first 
I want to analyze the condition in which 
you will live if you refuse, and demand 
complete freedom. 

Any doctor or psychologist will tell 
you that a sick soul will often produce 
a sick body. That you can accept as 


[94 J 


THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM 


proved, and if you try to live without the 
guiding hand of God your soul will sooner 
or later be a sick soul. Your soul, which 
is the spiritual life in you, cannot live 
without food any better than your body 
can. If you starve your body or feed it 
on poisonous food your body will first 
become sick and then die. And it is 
the same with your soul. If you feed 
your soul on stimulants and sawdust, 
or starve it altogether, your soul will 
become sick and the symptoms of its 
sickness will be these. You will find 
yourself living in a world of hurry and 
fear. When you get up in the morning 
your first emotions will be those of anxi- 
ety. As you look forward on the day 
which opens before you it will seem filled 
with a chaos of disagreeable things, all 
of which must be done, but for which 
there is not time enough; you will re- 
member the remark attributed to the 


[95 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


chorus girl that “life is just one damned 
thing after another.”” And as you look 
back upon the day after it is closed, you 
will feel exhausted with your futile effort, 
like a man who has been beating the air. 
No achievement will give you satisfac- 
tion and you will often wonder what is 
the purpose of life. If you make a lot of 
money you will find that it merely adds 
to your worries; if you lose money or lose 
your job, you will face the terrors of jail 
or the poorhouse. If you live on the 
income of money which your grandfather 
earned by the sweat of his brow, you will 
not be better off. You will be surrounded 
with worries just the same. In your 
household you will live in terror of your 
servants; the cook will quarrel with the 
chambermaid and give notice; the chore- 
man will get drunk and let the furnace go 
out; the chauffeur will run into your 
neighbor’s car at the street corner, so 


[96 J 


THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM 


that your car is “out of business” and 
your neighbor clamoring for damages; 
your dressmaker will be late in fin- 
ishing your ball dress and drive you 
into panic lest you miss the Jones’ 
ball. 

But perhaps the worst fear of them all 
is men’s fear of each other. To the foreign 
observer this is very noticeable in America 
—our terror of public opinion. It is not 
that our gossips and scandal-mongers 
are more active or more malicious than 
their prototypes in Europe. It is that we 
fear them more. But what can we ex- 
pect? What armor has a man against 
the criticism of his neighbors if he has 
nothing but his own private judgment to 
protect him? If you have thrown away 
the armor of the righteous man who puts 
his trust in God, you must not complain 
if the lightest word of your neighbor 
cuts you to the quick and you live in 


[97] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


constant dread of him. It is the reward 
of your own choice. 

It would be easy to multiply such ex- 
amples for there is really no end to them. 
The air is full of terrors of one sort or 
another. And where is the joy of life? 
Where “the peace which passeth under- 
standing’? Nowhere! Money cannot 
buy these and no friend can give you 
them. Your friends you will find are 
as poverty-stricken as yourself. 

This is the world in which many of 
those live whose souls are fed on sawdust. 
Flesh and blood cannot endure the strain. 
Sooner or later you will “blow up” more 
or less completely; the explosion may 
take the form of a nervous breakdown, 
leaving you a neurasthenic wreck; or it 
may be some other disease of the nervous 
system of which the doctor can tell you 
the scientific name but cannot cure you; 
or it may result in reducing your vitality 


[98 J 


THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM 


so that you are an easy prey to the disease 
germs which always surround you, grad- 
ing all the way from a succession of colds 
in the head to broncho-pneumonia. Just 
what form your disease will take no one 
can know; there is an almost infinite 
variety of forms in which the reduced 
vitality of your body, caused by the strug- 
gle of the will torn between body and 
soul may wreak its revenge. You may be 
very ill or die or what is far worse, you 
may never be very sick but never very 
well. This is perhaps the worst condition 
because it is so unheroic; no one will 
pity you except yourself, and there will 
be no joy in life. 

Such a condition is one which a starved 
soul will produce in many cases. You can 
see thousands of them about you. But 
this will not always happen, nor in fact 
is it the commonest case. The commonest 
case is a far worse thing. 


[ 99 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


If you look around you, having in mind 
what I have just been saying, you will 
think it is not true to life, or at least that 
it is a gross exaggeration. Most of the 
people you see are not obviously sick 
and many of them seem happy. And you 
will be perfectly right; most of them seem 
happy and some of them really are. But 
I am forced to say to you that in the 
world of America as I have seen it during 
the last thirty years, true happiness is 
not too common. There are a blessed 
few who have it, but those men and 
women, without exception, have a living, 
vivid faith in a personal God. 

Of the rest many are not sick and seem 
contented enough, but this is true also 
of the cabbages. A good cabbage is 
healthy and contented. One might say 
the same of a granite boulder. But cab- 
bages and stones are not human. The 
quality which distinguishes man from the 


[100 7 


THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM 


animal, the vegetable and the mineral, 
is his soul—the spiritual part of him— 
the capacity or self-consciousness which 
enables him to know pain and _ joy. 
When a man’s soul is dead (or even when 
it is torpid) he does not suffer. From 
that he is immune, like a stone, and if, 
as a result of poisoning or starvation, 
his soul is dead or comatose, he will not 
suffer pain or even disease. His bodily 
health may be excellent and he may enjoy 
his meals. But so does a dog, and the 
man who has purchased immunity from 
disease and pain at the price of his im- 
mortal soul, has paid a high price for it. 
That course is open to us all and many 
take it. But they know not what they 
do. Some day they will be faced with 
death. Then they will know the paralyz- 
ing terror of gazing into the Unknown. 
When the torpid soul of such a man be- 
gins to come to life again, the agony is 


[ 101 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


intense. This I know, for I have ex- 
perienced it. The man who, in trying to 
live without a faith in God, shall take 
refuge from the pain and terror that 
beset him in the spiritual drug habit 
(doping his soul), is a worse fool than the 
man who seeks to deaden his bodily suf- 
fering by taking opium. For if he be 
consistent in the latter course and take 
opium enough he will die without suf- 
fering. But it is not so with his soul. 
His soul is a part of God. He cannot kill 
it and however often or however much 
he may try to suppress it, the day will 
come when he can keep it down no longer. 
It will come quivering to life and inflict 
upon him the tortures of the damned. 

I have referred to the stopping of 
spiritual pain as a process of drugging 
the soul. This is what some of us do; 
drug it with the excitement of gambling 
in one form or another. Some do it 


[ 102 7] 


THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM 


with poker or bridge whist, some by 
gambling in their business, some by 
gambling with their lives in sports or 
hunting. But a more common method 
by which men seek to suppress or déaden 
their souls is by submerging or drowning © 
them in a sea of business matters and 
elaborate forms of society. Your busy 
man of affairs rushing from one director’s 
meeting to another from morning till 
midnight, and your society woman with 
her balls, teas, committee meetings and 
card parties, are all engaged in exactly 
that process. They are trying to sub- 
merge or drown their souls and deaden 
their spiritual pains; to thrust aside the 
questions about God, Immortality and 
the whole world of the Spirit which are 
ever springing up in the alert, self- 
conscious mind. 

And for a time they can and do suc- 


ceed. But ultimately, this defense will 
[ 103 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


collapse, and then the ruin is_ shat- 
tering. 

This phase of modern life is the exact 
opposite of the attitude of faith, breathing 
out of the past in the sayings: “Be still 
and remember that I am God” or “He 
who believeth doth not make haste.” It 
is the child of willfulness—the negation of 
faith. 

I have said before that the knowledge 
which we have of living men (the people 
about us) is not to be compared with the 
knowledge which we can have of Jesus. 
We think and speak of the men and 
women about us as real people, and to 
many of us the man Jesus is unreal. But 
if you will look your world squarely in 
the face, what could be more unreal (in 
the most literal meaning of the word) 
than the body of a live man from which 
the soul or spirit has fled, or in which it is 
asleep? ‘These are the mere ghosts -of 


[104 7] 


THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM 


men and women by whom you are sur- 
rounded. Their reality has disappeared. 

So do not be misled. All those whom 
you see about you living without faith 
in God, and living apparently happy 
lives will some day know a day of reckon- 
ing. They are the mere ghosts of men 
today. But some day the spirit will 
awake and will have to be reckoned with. 
It is sheer folly to desire to be immune 
from pain. Pain is essential to life. Our 
bodily pains are the safety valves of the 
body, and anguish of the spirit is a saving 
grace. When you have a cold in your 
head, a pain in your leg, or a stomach 
ache, you know that it is a warning that 
you have violated some hygienic law, 
and if you are wise you consult your doc- 
tor. If you disregard these warnings or 
deaden the pain with drugs, you will 
produce a worse condition, which may 


end in death. The last thing you desire 
[ 105 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


in the physical world is to miss such 
warnings. People who “go on their 
nerves,’ as we say, are doing exactly 
that and the result is an ultimate explo- 
sion or breakdown which shatters them 
for life. 

The world of the spirit is ruled by the 
same law. Anguish of the spirit is a sign 
of life. The more vividly we live the 
more we suffer, but the more also we en- 
joy. The sensations of pain and joy are 
the proof, and the only proof that we are 
spiritually alive. We must seek to be 
more alive (that is, to suffer more) in 
order that we may expand our spiritual 
nature and thereby gain a greater knowl- 
edge and a greater share of God. For 
the soul of each one of us is a part of God. 
Anguish of the spirit is the growing pain 
which proves that we are enlarging our 
own souls and making them larger parts 


of God. Such things are the very breath 
[ 106 7 


THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM | 


of life and that man is worse than a fool, 
he is a lunatic, who seeks refuge in spirit- 
ual narcotics from spiritual pain. 

But to a man without a faith in God, 
that is, a man who has lost faith in his 
own soul, such a course may well be the 
path of least resistance. For if he does 
not believe in his own soul, why should 
he bear these pains? Deaden them with 
meat, drink and excitement! ‘“ Drink 
today for tomorrow we die” and “the 
Devil take the hindmost!” It is the 
gospel of despair and it will not work, 
but of the men and women whom you 
see around you, apparently happy, with- 
out a belief in God, many have adopted 
it. 

But I repeat, it will not work. The 
day of reckoning will come and it will 
be fearful beyond the power of words. I 
know whereof I speak, and I beg you in 
God’s name not to try it. Such a state 


[ 107 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


of mind and body is the result of spiritual 
anarchy; of adopting as your guiding 
principle your own willfulness; of refusing 
to surrender to the will of God. But it is 
better to live in a world of fears than 
drug yourself into a spiritual automaton; 
better still to nurture and build up your 
faith in God, surrender your will to His, 
and live in His world of joy and peace. 
I must next try to tell you how faith in 
God will banish fear and bring you peace. 


[ 108 7 


CHAPTER V 
THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE 


My own experience has made it clear 
to me that spiritual anarchy—that is, the 
effort to guide my life by my own will 
uncontrolled and unaided by the will 
of God—is not freedom but a degrading 
slavery. Man becomes the servant of 
Passion and Whim; they are hard task- 
masters and even the cold discipline of 
Pure Reason is a life destroying thing. 

I have tried to describe my own ex- 
perience of the condition into which the 
soul will fall if man tries to live without 
the guiding hand of God; the sickness 
of his soul which will result from living 
in a chaotic and fear ridden world; or the 
torpor which will follow the attempt to 
drown the activities of his spirit. Cer- 


[109 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


tainly these are not conditions of free- 
dom and health. 

When the body is sick there are two 
classes of people who can describe the 
symptoms of the patient, the doctor 
(medical or spiritual) from whom he 
seeks advice, and the patient himself. 
Each will consider the symptoms from a 
different point of view, and their com- 
bined judgment may often be superior to 
that of either one alone. But of the 
symptoms of health this is less true. The 
doctors have no complete record of the 
symptoms of health for they rarely see 
it professionally, and from the nature 
of their profession they are only vaguely 
interested in it. We do not consider it 
the doctor’s business to keep us well; 
and they rarely see us when we are. 
Once our pains vanish, we vanish too, 
and our doctors see us no more until we 
have another pain. And, therefore, the 


[1107 


THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE 


man who can best describe the symptoms 
of health is the man who has been sick 
but has recovered; the man who having 
known disease has fought his way out of 
it into a state of health and can compare 
the symptoms of these two states. This 
is part of the meaning of Christ’s saying, 
“Ye must be born again of water and of 
the spirit if ye would enter the Kingdom 
of Heaven,” and in this fact lies the power 
of Harold Begbie’s famous book “Twice 
Born Men.” 1 

The man who seeks to be complete 
master of his own life—who tries to “go 


> 


it alone,” so to speak—finds that he is 
not free, and I have succeeded in con- 
vincing myself of the truth of the para- 
dox that true freedom of the soul can only 
be achieved by the utter surrender of the 
will to God. Not until you can say with 
perfect truth, “Not my will but thine 


be done,” will your will be free. Many of 


[111 ] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


us have presumed to reverse the words, 
saying in fact: “‘not thy will but mine 
be done.’ Slavery is the result. 

In order to explain what I mean I must 
ask you to leap out of the world of pain, 
fear, and unreality in which many of us 
have lived, into the real world—that is, 
God’s world—in which we might be 
living; the world of comparative spiritual 
health in which each one of us can, I 
believe, live if he chooses. I say compara- 
tive advisedly, because perfect health 
of body or soul is almost unknown to man. 

The vital principle—or life-giving air— 
of God’s world is faith in God—an un- 
questioning knowledge that there is a 
God; that He is wise and loving, and that 
we are His children and servants. Com- 
pare the man with such a faith with the 
man without it. The man without faith 
finds himself daily beset with questions 


as to what he ought to do which he can- 
[112 7] 


THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE. 


not answer. If he be conscientious he 
will want to work in the service of man- 
kind; he will, in short, want to be useful. 
But how shall he go about it? He will 
see a dozen, or a hundred, courses open 
to him, and a thousand things clamoring 
to be done, with no clear principle of 
guidance. All of the opportunities are 
worth considering and many of them 
look equally good, but whatever course 
he decides upon today will seem of doubt- 
ful wisdom tomorrow, and as a result, 
he will fall into one of two conditions, 
both of which are bad. Either he will 
be pulled hither and yon in a chaos, or 
whirling nebula, of conflicting claims, or 
else he will stop his ears to all of them and 
go plugging laboriously and mechanically 
away at one piece of work out of which 
all the life and possibility of vivid beauty 
has vanished. With no pole star or com- 
pass (no fundamental principle) to guide 


[ 113 | 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


him, his life will be a futile thing and he 
will know it for what it is; a thing not 
worth having. Such a vision is despair, 
and this very despair is the spur which 
may well prove his salvation. 

For if the man can attain a perfect 
faith in God the scene will shift as if by 
magic. ‘Then he knows that he is the 
servant of God; that the purpose of his 
life, and his only true happiness, lies in 
willing, loving service, and at once chaos 
becomes clear vision. The welter of 
conflicting claims and duties gives place 
to order, the child of law, and clear day- 
light drives away the murk. To every 
claim which presents itself he can put the 
question, Is this the will of God, whose 
servant I am? and whatever the nature 
of the claim, opportunity or service, he 
knows that no serious mistake of judg- 
ment is possible, for he who always tries 
to do the will of God cannot go far wrong. 


[114 7] 


THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE 


It is the spirit behind the work and not 
the job itself that is important. Any 
work done by a man with the spirit of 
joyful service is good work in accordance 
with the will of God. No work is too 
humble, and none too exhausting, if it 
be done in that spirit. When Jesus said, 
*“My yoke is easy,” that was a part of 
what he meant. No man who is con- 
sciously doing what he believes to be the 
will of God will feel burdened. This is 
partly due to the fact that fear is ban- 
ished; relieved of that killing strain, he 
will feel at once the sense of freedom. He 
will know peace, the phrase in the prayer 
book, “the peace which passeth under- 
standing.” 

The comfort which bathes the man 
whose life is unified or polarized by a firm 
and simple faith is a heavenly thing, and 
if faith did nothing more for him than 
thus to orient and unify his motives and 


[115 ] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


his efforts, it would amply justify the 
struggle to attain and hold it. For it is 
a battle, and often a hard one, which I 
shall try later to make clear. 

It is true that faith will give a man a 
clear standard of values by which to 
decide upon his course but that is only 
a small part of its power, for it will also 
banish fear, the greatest enemy of man; 
the Devil’s most powerful weapon. To 
the man of faith fear is literally unknown; 
it has been clean wiped out. Take, for 
instance, fears about money, a form of 
strain which saps the vitality of many a 
man. These commonly take the form 
of fears of unemployment for the man 
without capital (the workingman) and 
fear of loss of capital for the man who has 
it; fear of business depression or the fail- 
ure of some business venture. But the 
man who works in the service of God will 
never lack employment for it puts re- 


[ 116 |] 


THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE 


liability and power into any work to 
which he puts his hand, so that to an 
employer he is like treasure trove. The 
man who works for God first and for a 
dollar second will never lack the dollar. 
Good service to society is always well 
paid. The man animated with the spirit 
of service will be the last man dropped 
from the payroll by the shrewd employer. 
Business depressions may come and go 
but the hold of such a man upon his job 
is too strong for them to break. No de- 
pression is deep enough to reach and dis- 
lodge him. 

And what is true of the workingman 
is true also of his employer, the capitalist. 
~ His troubles and his fears arise from the 
conditions of the markets. In times of 
depression some manufacturers’ output 
will go begging. But it will not be the 
output of the man animated with a spirit 
of service, for he will have woven his 


[117] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


faith into his goods. ‘To such a man cus- 
tomers will stick. 

Many business failures are the result 
of taking chances; of speculation or 
gambling, in some form. The man who 
works only for dollars wants to get them 
quick and is not too careful how he gets 
them. This spirit tends to promote 
shoddy work and gambling methods, 
which will sooner or later come home to 
roost. But the man who works for his 
own soul and who really feels that he is in 
the service of God, is exempt from these 
temptations and, therefore, protected 
from the fears which follow in their wake. 

Another group of fears by which men 
are harried are those of disease and death. 
From these the man of faith is wholly 
immune, for if he believes in God, he 
knows himself to be immortal, and he 
can honestly say that whether he live 
or whether he die it matters not. Of 


[ 118 ] 


THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE 


course faith will not protect a man 
against all the ups and downs of life, 
and it is better so, for variety is the spice 
of life and monotony an intolerable bur- 
den. But the man of faith will not worry 
about these ups and downs. The petty 
worries of the household, which bulk so 
large in these days, will have no terrors 
for him, for he lives in a world in which 
the squabblings of cooks, chambermaids 
and choremen are inaudible. What if 
the cook does give notice? He will not 
starve. A little inconvenience is no great 
misfortune, and if he is put to it, he can 
cook his dinner and tend the furnace 
himself. His equanimity will not be 
ruffied by such trifles. Whatever comes 
to him he will know that it is good, and 
will be content. 

Against the hounding fear of public 
opinion, he is protected also, for if he has 
done his best to serve his community 


[119 7 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


and his God, he will fear no man’s opin- 
ion. In the phrase of a famous American 
public servant he “can look any man 
in the face and tell him to go to 
Hell.” 

Few men of middle age can look back 
upon their experience and deny the fact 
that most of the anxieties which have 
caused them so much worry were about 
things that never happened. In nine 
cases out of ten the worry was needless. 
It was a fear from which faith would have 
saved him. He will remember many 
days when he was harassed by a swarm of 
petty worries, each trivial in itself but — 
most burdensome in the aggregate, all 
of which would have vanished if he had 
been able to lift himself into the higher 
strata of consciousness from which they 
could be seen in true proportion. Faith 
will give a man just that power by pro- 
viding a new scale of values. 


C1207 


THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE 


Faith in God will not only unify a man’s ~ 


efforts, and banish his fears, but it will 
endow him with eternal youth. That is 
perhaps its greatest blessing. The spirit 
of youth has many ingredients, but the 
most important of them are adventurous 
courage, and sympathetic alertness, which 
bestow the power to meet and to profit by 
changing conditions and which keep 
alive the romance of life. The spirit of 
youth is the spirit of action; and reflec- 
tion of high vitality and keen intelligence. 
The spirit of youth does not “srr in 
the seats of the scornful.’ It gets up and 
does something about it. Old age sits 
and criticizes. That is its trademark. 

These are normal qualities in young 
people which faith will not only keep 
alive, but will increase, so that the older 
a man grows the younger he is in spirit, 
paradoxical as that may seem. ‘The 


stodgy automatism of middle age,—that 
[ 121 ] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


lee shore upon which many of us drift as 
a result of a comatose or submerged soul 


will never wreck the man with faith. 
You will see in him the sensitive alert- 
ness and sympathy of a healthy child, 
unmixed with the sentimental softness 
to which older people are so prone. 
Sentimentality is a weakness which drugs 
the soul; it is the child of sloth—the 
father of sin—and it has nothing in 
common with the alert sympathy which 
is the child of faith. 

Such alertness, imaginativeness and 
courage make a favorable soil for spirit- 
ual growth. These are the children or the 
results of faith, and are a sure protection 
against the germs of spiritual old age, 
to which most of us fall such easy prey. 
Without faith a man will inevitably live 
in a fear ridden world or sink into a sod- 
den automaton; that is, he will grow old, 


which is partial death. 
[122] 


THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE 


These qualities, a true standard of 
value which puts power into his work; 
freedom from fear which relieves him 
from unnecessary strain, and the spirit of 
youth which enables him to expand and 
express his soul, characterize the man of 
perfect faith; in other words, the perfect 
man. But we need not despair if we find 
that we lack some wholly, all in part— 
and that at times we lose even those parts 
which we possess. Such is the fate of 
men. No man is perfect, and no man’s 
faith is always clear. Things bursting 
upon us suddenly may shake the equa- 
nimity of the most serene; ill health may 
cloud the vision and obscure the pole star 
of the most reverent, and the accidents of 
human life and the weaknesses of human 
beings may darken the mind of the most 
spiritual. But if we know the value of 
the powers which come to us through 
faith and have experienced the joy of 


[ 123 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


using them, we shall recover our balance 
after a shock and with the renewal of 
faith through prayer, we shall get back 
onto our course again and be all the better 
for the experience. 

To possess these powers full grown and 
always to be able to exercise them is a 
perfection which we can hardly hope for. 
There is only one example known to me 
of such a man—the man Jesus. Of 
Him this was true. These were some of 
His essential characteristics, and, as I 
have said before, intimate knowledge of 
the character of Jesus is essential to our 
faith, for thus we shall come to see the 
face of God, and there is nothing which 
will so quickly restore the vitality of a 
weakened faith as an earnest study of the 
teachings and of the life of Christ. When 
beset and beaten upon by the storms of 
life so that we seem to have lost our way, 
there is the guidance which will never fail 


[ 124 ] 


THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE 


to bring back the worshipper to his true 
course. 

Such is a dim and ill drawn picture of 
a soul in perfect health. It is an ideal 
state which men do not reach. Like the 
answer of the horse doctor to my ques- 
tion whether a horse was sound; “‘Sound! 
No! I never see a horse that was. But 
this one is sounder than most of ’em,”’ 
so it is with men. No man’s soul is in 
perfect health, but if we know what a 
healthy soul is like, it will be more pos- 
sible for us to imitate or approach it. 


[125 7] 


CHAPTER VI 
THE SKILL TO USE 
Tuning In 


“In the good old times” harps were 
an essential item in the furnishing of 
an orthodox Heaven, symbolizing, I sup- 
pose, the harmony of the soul of man 
with its Maker. But they have unfor- 
tunately become associated in our minds 
with clouds and dampness which the 
doctors have taught this generation to 
avoid, and as we now believe that Heaven 
may be entered from the ground, so to 
speak, I ask your permission to adopt 
the symbols of “‘ wireless” in this chapter. 

The souls of the faithful surrendered 
to the will of God must be kept constantly 
in tune so that they may receive His 
commands clear and unconfused by the 


[ 126 |] 


THE SKILL TO USE 


jangling discords of the natural world. 
No man can be an efficient servant who 
is unable to hear the word of command. 
It is not enough to say “Not my will 
but thine be done’; we must know what 
His will is. The soul is like a radio re- 
ceiving set which each man must learn 
how to adjust and must keep in perfect 
adjustment. The skill to do this is per- 
haps the only essential wisdom for man to 
seek. Without it the slave of God is not 
free; he is not even a useful slave. 

The healthy soul which I have tried to 
describe, the soul transfused with faith, 
must be maintained in health. In search- 
ing for the best way to do this I find the 
rules of medical hygiene useful. Assum- 
ing that you have a young and healthy 
soul, how are you to keep it so? 

In the case of your body the formula 
is good food, exercise in the fresh air 


and plenty of sleep. The formula for 
[ 127 |] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


the soul is akin to it. Your soul is young 
and healthy but it is not full grown; it 
needs food, exercise and rest to make it 
erow. 

The food of the spirit is comradeship 
with the great spirits who have gone 
before you, and with the spiritual beauty 
of the natural world which your God 
created to be part of your bread of life. 
The character of men of spiritual genius 
shines through their acts, for character 
speaks louder and more clearly than 
acts or words, and this source of sus- 
tenance is opened to us through the re- 
corded history of great men. There have 
been men of great spiritual power in 
every walk of life. We are not limited to 
the saints, the prophets and the mission- 
aries—Prophets of the Old Testament, 
Christ, St. Augustine and St. Francis, 
Livingston, Father Damien and _ the 
others. We may also feed on great char- 


[128 J 


THE SKILL TO USE 


acters like Washington, Chinese Gordon, 
Robert E. Lee and Lincoln, and great 
natures like Beethoven, Leonardo da 
Vinci, Dante, and Shakespeare. Get ac- 
quainted with them and live with them. 
Comradeship with these men through 
their lives and writings will infuse your 
spirit with their power. But remember 
this, you are of the Christian faith, and 
whatever you choose and whatever you 
discard, frequent the society of Christ. 
If you do that you will have done well 
and you will know how to go on and do 
better. 

There is no form of spiritual food 
better than the intimate society of spirit- 
ual people. Such people radiate a life- 
giving influence which is priceless. Don’t 
miss your share of it. 

The great danger which we must guard 
against in selecting our spiritual food, is 


the temptation to eat candy and take 
[ 129 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


stimulants. We crave such things and 
people around us are rather prone to 
them too. In feeding their bodies they 
eat too much sugar, and too much fat, 
and they eat too often. Plain food and 
time enough between meals to digest 
it—that is the rule of health for the body. 

And it is the same with the soul. You 
can’t feed your soul on stimulants and 
sawdust and expect it to thrive. Don’t 
do it. A little candy, an occasional 
cocktail, or a cup of coffee, won’t hurt 
you. But don’t think you can live on 
them. And don’t eat too much or too 
often. Give your spirit time to digest 
what you feed to it; give yourself time 
to think. That is spiritual exercise. 

And it is important, also that your 
meals be regular and well timed. Don’t 
eat five meals a day or one, and don’t 
eat at two i the morning, when you 


ought to be asleep. The best spiritual 
[ 130 J 


THE SKILL TO USE 


mealtimes for the average person are 
morning and evening. These have been 
the times of prayer from time immemo- 
rial, and the psychoanalysts now come 
forward to inform us that these are the 
times at which the threshold of the sub- 
conscious mind is the lowest; that is, 
the times at which it is easiest to get 
things through to the subconscious mind’ 
which is in such close connection with 
the spirit. 

From very early times also it has been 
customary for religious people to pray 
at noon. “‘Morning, evening and at noon 
will I pray” says the Psalmist, and in 
my own case I have found that good 
advice. But the reason, I think, is dif- 
ferent from the reason for prayer morn- 
ing and evening. With most of us today 
the subconscious mind is hard to reach 
at noontime; the threshold is too high 
to step over, because at that time we are 


[131] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


immersed in the material and the busi- 
ness world. But that is the very reason 
for prayer or quiet thought at noontime. 
The spirit needs rest and food. If we 
feed it at that hour, we shall not be so 
ravenously hungry at night that we 
shall bolt our evening meal and get 
spiritual indigestion. 

I have spoken of morning, noon and 
night as the times to feed the spirit with 
prayer, and that is good, but when I 
feed it with reading or with human inter- 
course, the evening is the best time for 
me, because at that time my imagination 
is more alert and I remember better. 
It used to be my practice, as it is with 
most men, to read the newspapers in 
the evening and then go to bed, but the 
change in the condition of my mind 
which resulted from substituting the 
Testaments for the Transcript was mi- 
raculous. Your subconscious mind seems 


[132 7] 


i 


THE SKILL TO USE 


to spend the night in digesting what you 
put into your head in the evening. So 
don’t feed it newspaper chaff at that 
hour, or bridge whist. Feed it on fine 
literature, fine music, or the society of 
fine people. And take my word for it, 
you will detect the difference and so will 
your friends. 

There is another form of food for the 
body besides meat and drink, namely, 
the air we breathe—which we live on 
continuously—and cannot live without. 
It is so, also, with the soul. We must 
have good spiritual air to breathe; in 
other words, we must keep ourselves 
serene by the exercise of will power— 
avoiding anger, hurry and the petty 
worries of life, which pollute the air 
about us. It is a thing quite within 
our power to brush these states of mind 
aside, and to lift ourselves into the pure 
air of equanimity and benevolence. The 


[ 133 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


conscious exercise of the will for this 
purpose is what St. Paul meant, I think, 
when he said “‘Pray without ceasing.’’: 

So much for food. Now for exercise 
in the open air. Nothing is more essen- 
tial than to keep the spirit active and 
alert. Prayer, meditation and the prac- 
tice of your faith are the ways to do it. 
These are peculiarly individual things. 
They are different for every soul, just 
as different forms and amounts of exer- 
cise are required by each human body. 
But they cannot be neglected or fatty 
degeneration of the soul sets in. Each 
of us must have his sanctuary in which to 
pray, each of us must use the silent places 
of nature for quiet thought, and each of 
us must practice some form of common 
worship in a regular and systematic way. 
Such precepts are commonplaces in the 
rules of bodily hygiene, but they are far 
more important in the world of the spirit. 


[134 7] 


THE SKILL TO USE 


Now, what do we mean by spiritual 
fresh air? The body cannot do without 
it and neither can the soul. The door 
to it is opened by the immortal youth 
which your faith will give you. One of 
its qualities is the spirit of adventure; 
the joy of taking risks and seeking ad- 
ventures for your faith. Like the knight 
errant of old, going on a dragon. hunt 
for his best girl, so the soul must adven- 
ture and do battle for its faith. That is 
the fresh air on which the soul is fed. 
Faith is a great adventure! Never for- 
get that, but do not confuse it with 
wildness and undisciplined conduct. 
With those it has nothing in common. 
Your knight errant was no undisciplined 
fighter. His every act was governed by 
the sternest rules: the laws of the Round 
Table were like the etiquette of the Four 
Hundred. 

The distinction is so vital that you 


[135 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


must pardon me if I labor the point. 
Many young people see no distinction 
between adventure and gambling, but 
it is a vital one. Adventure in the spirit- 
ual world is taking risks for the sake of 
your faith; and not just for the fun of it. 
The latter is gambling, taking risks to 
satisfy an appetite or a passion. The 
instinct to take risks is one of the most 
deep rooted in the race. It is the result 
of having lived for some hundred thou- 
sand years ina world full of dangers 
to life and limb. The men who have 
survived, survived through the skill 
and courage with which they met 
them. 

Now the exercise of skill is always 
pleasant and so we who survive like 
danger; we would not part with it on 
any account; the monotony of perfect 
safety is a killing thing. This is what we 
sometimes call the sporting instinct, 


[136 7 


THE SKILL TO USE 


or the spirit of sportsmanship. Whether 
we realize it or not it is there, deep bedded 
in our nature. If we do not put it to a 
good use, it will put itself to a bad one, 
for “The Devil always finds a job for 
idle hands to do.” It is perhaps the 
most important object in our lives to 
find a spiritual outlet for this craving be- 
fore it breaks from our control and gets 
into mischief. Very fortunately, spiritual 
adventure will satisfy it far better than 
gambling, and it is not for nothing that 
Christianity is the most adventurous 
religion in the world. It is founded on 
the sporting instinct; that is the secret 
of its power. And failure to grasp that 
fact is the reason why Christian Scientists 
so often fall a prey to sentimentality, 
for they have emasculated Christianity 
and greatly weakened it as a sportsman- 
like or knightly venture. They have 
abolished sin and pain—saying that such 


[ 137 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


things are unreal and do not exist. But 
as a matter of fact, pain and suffering 
are essential to life. They are the true 
signs that you are alive. 

Think for just one minute of the grand 
adventure of Christian immortality and 
then for another of the wild faith which 
enabled Jesus to announce that “‘he who 
loseth his life shall find it,’ or of his 
precept, ““take no heed for the morrow, 
what ye shall eat or what ye shall put on.”’ 
Give five minutes of concentrated im- 
aginative effort to picturing what these 
sayings imply and then deny, if you can, 
that our Christian faith provides all the 
opportunities for adventure that the 
most greedy can crave. The fact is that 
Christianity is such a sporting proposi- 
tion that it has daunted all but the bold- 
est, and only isolated individuals have 
ever tried to live by it. But I suggest to 
you quite seriously that it is worth trying; 


[188 7] 


THE SKILL TO USE 


that it is in fact the breath of life, for the 
lack of which we die. Let the young 
men of power in search of a profession 
turn away from business and go into the 
ministry, in spite of the fact that as a 
profession it 1s said to be poorly paid. 
You will find that it is not. The bread » 
of life is not all bought with dollars. The 
minister who is worthy of his job is a 
well-paid man. If he honestly serve 
society he will get dollars enough to 
buy his bread, and in addition he will 
get the bread of life thrown in for good 
measure; the amazing comfort born of 
the knowledge that he is one of God’s 
most useful servants. 

Or once clearly grasp what is meant 
by Christian immortality, by our belief 
that each of us is a son of God—that is 
a part of Him—and you will realize what 
a wild adventure it is to enlarge that part 


by driving forward into the unknown 
I 139 |] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


world which lies before every scientific 
adventurer. 

No one who sees the full beauty and 
power of these things will ever complain 
that life lacks excitement and resort to 
the dull business of ordinary gambling. 
Think of the possibilities of adventure 
in social service when it is illuminated 
and shot through with a romantic Chris- 
tian faith. And so I say to you that life 
viewed from this angle is the most excit- 
ing adventure which man can conceive, 
and that only the coward or the dunce 
will ask for any other. This is what is 
called the dream of the idealist and is 
alleged to be an unreal world. But that 


I do not believe. Whatever men may 
say to the contrary, I say the ideal or 


spiritual world is the only real world; the 
only world in which man can be truly 
alive. 


The last rule of spiritual hygiene is 
[ 140 J 


“THE SKILL TO USE 


plenty of sleep. This will be found the 
easiest of all the rules by those who have 
obeyed the others, for they will bring 
you serenity and peace; the sense of 
having played the game which will give 
you the sleep of the just. It will come 
without effort, a thing of nature. Of 
course I do not mean only the sleep of a 
sound and tired body, but the rest from 
labor of the soul conscious of having done 
its work; the complete relief from fear 
and worry of every sort and description. 
Aiquinimitas, a heaven on earth. 

And now like the well behaved smelt 
on your dinner table, served with his 
tail in his mouth, I end where I began. 
The souls of the faithful must often be 
tuned to the pitch of God’s universe. 
Worship is the way to do it and so the 
technique of worship is our most vital 
study. 

We have all seen the first violinist at 


[1417] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


a concert of the Symphony Orchestra 
tune his instrument on the fly. He can 
do in a second what might take a novice 
five minutes and do it better. Or com- 
pare the skill of the wireless expert ad- 
justing his receiving set with your own 
efforts in that direction. 

The tuning of the soul is like that, I 
think. Most of us boggle at it grossly, 
or throw up our hands and remain sin- 
fully out of tune. But it is a skill which 
we must acquire at peril of our spiritual 
life. We can’t begin too early or study 
it too hard. 


E 142 ‘J 


CHAPTER VII 
BROKEN STRINGS 


Those who frequent the Symphony 
Concerts have often heard a string on 
one of the first violins break with a 
whang, and must have been amazed at 
the steadiness of the player making 
shift to finish the phrase on the remain- 
ing three, and then repairing the damage 
swiftly and with skill. If he had jumped 
from his chair instead, thrown his in- 
strument at the audience, and bounced 
off the stage, he would have behaved 
in exactly the way many of us do when 
one of the heart-strings which we de- 
pend upon in the material world is 
broken by accident and leaves us crip- 
pled. The instrument of life has per- . 
haps four main strings, like the vio- 


[ 143 |] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


lin —our dearest, personal relations to 
husband, wife, child and friend; our 
health of body and mind; our material 
resources whether income or capital; and 
our love of our nation and our race. 
These are all temporal and temporary 
relations—short lived and subject to sud- 
den change — which are on a wholly dif- 
ferent level or strata from our life in the 
spiritual world. The shattering of any 
of them should leave that life untouched. 
But all men have seen in themselves or 
in others, such accidents in the material 
world shatter what men call their faith. 
I have known men, for example, who 
thought they believed in God, but who 
woke up to find that they didn’t when 
the death of wife, child or friend, sud- 
denly wrenched them from their moor- 
ings and cast them adrift in sleet and 
gale upon a lee-shore. ‘There comes 
back to me the story of a musician whose 


[ 144 7] 


BROKEN STRINGS 


life and livelihood depended upon his 
music, in whom faith was shattered 
when deafness fell upon him. Many 
cases occur where men put their work and 
their money into business with other 
men whom they trust, who betray them 
and leave them shattered and penni- 
less; and there were those to whom the 
American Civil War, or the World War, 
through which we have just passed, 
seemed a catastrophe wholly incompat- 
ible with the rule of a just and loving 
God. 

But stop long enough to consider 
what such an attitude means. The man 
whose faith in God is destroyed by any 
or all of these occurrences, never in fact, 
had a true faith. A faith which dies 
so easily was not a faith, but an intel- 
lectual conception, a precept, a philoso- 
phy, if you like, but not a life. Is man 
more just than his Maker or more wise? 


[ 145 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


His knowledge of the scheme of the uni- 
verse in which he lives, great as it has 
grown to be, is so minute in comparison 
with the wisdom of the God who made 
it, as to be almost negligible. What he 
knows, compared with what he does 
not know, is trivial. And yet men with 
their puny knowledge presume to judge 
God, and to declare that some catas- 
trophe which disturbs the smooth run- 
ning of their lives—the breaking of 
some string which binds them to life —is 
evidence that God does not know his 
business or that he does not rule the 
world. The violinist has pitched his 
instrument into the audience and fled 
from the stage. 

That such trials and such attitudes 
are not of modern origin is proved by 
the Book of Job. Read in the light of 
these experiences, it might have been 
written today. Man has ever been 


[146 7] 


BROKEN STRINGS 


prone, it seems, to think himself “‘more 
wise than his Maker.” To make it 
even clearer, take an example out of 
daily life. Suppose that any one of us 
were to walk into the assembling room 
of the great shops of the General Elec- 
tric Company in Schenectady, where me- 
chanics were putting together the parts 
of a 50,000 K.W. alternating current 
generator. These contrivances look com- 


plicated to the average man and _ it 
would never occur to him to stop the 


work and tell the workmen that the 
designer of that machine didn’t know 
his business. If he did such a thing, 
he would be locked up as a dangerous 
lunatic. But the plan of that generator 
is simplicity itself beside the scheme 
of the universe. The men therefore, 
who dare to criticize God’s handiwork 
can only be those who are so ignorant 
and so unimaginative that they have 


C1477] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


hardly realized that there is a plan 
and a God. 

Criticize Charles Steinmetz for his 
design of the generator by all means 
if you choose, but beware how you set 
yourself up to criticize the work of God. 
You will not be locked up in the prisons 
of men, but you will be locked in a far 
worse place — the dungeon of your mind 
in company with a torpid soul. 

Such incidents as “war, pestilence, 
famine or sudden death” are not acci- 
dents which can destroy true faith 
in the Almighty, but wise and _ benef- 
icent acts of grace designed to try 
man’s faith. If a man’s faith will not 
stand up to these blasts, the sooner 
he finds it out the better, for it merely 
proves that what he called his faith 
was not the real article. He is better 
off without it for then at least the space ~ 
is available for something better. 


[148 J 


BROKEN STRINGS 


Like the violinist when the string 
snaps in his face, a man may well be 
startled, and even dismayed momen- 
tarily by the accidents of life, but if 
he has a real faith, he will throw himself 
upon it all the more at such times in 
order that God may pull him through. 
The violinist, with three sound strings 
instead of four, uses the ones he has 
all the harder, and men of faith cling 
more desperately to it when washed 
overboard by the storms of life. 

Faith is the offspring of love which 
is unshakable; the faith which can be 
shaken is not faith, but a philosophy 
or creed — good things in their places, 
but poor substitutes for faith. They 
cannot pass the acid test. Faith as I 
feel it, is an inner heat welling up out 
of the heart and no event in the ma- 
terial world can stop the flow. 


Let me put this to you in the form of 
[149 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


a story. Years ago, before the automo- 
bile deluge, my business required me 
to travel a good deal in central Massa- 
chusetts, with an old-fashioned horse and 
buggy. At intervals along the country 
roads, some good Samaritan had placed 
watering troughs or barrels into which a 
hillside spring had been piped to quench 
the thirst of horse and man. Many of 
them came from shallow sources and 
dried up under the August sun, but one 
of them was known far and wide as a 
hardy perennial. It never dried up or 
froze up. 

Now it happened one hot forenoon, 
that I came to that spring a thirsty 
man with a thirsty horse, and behold 
the barrel was empty and dry. Sam, 
the driver, whose tongue was fairly 
hanging out of his mouth, cursed the 
luck with fluency and power and gathered 


up his reins. But I had a “real think.” 
[ 150 7] 


BROKEN STRINGS 


“Hold on, Sam,” I said, “that spring 
can’t be dry. It’s never been dry 
since this country was settled.”’ “‘Look 
at the d thing. It’s been dry for a 
week,”? was his only answer. But I 
wouldn’t have it. That sort of miracle 
doesn’t happen. 

Jumping out of the trap, I climbed 





the bank onto the wooded mountain 
side from which the spring bubbled 
and in five minutes the mystery was 
solved. When I reached the spring, 
there it was sure enough brimming its 
little pool. It was only the connecting 
pipe that was at fault. A wind storm 
some days before had blown a tree 
across it. The connection was broken 
but the spring was not dry. A few min- 
utes work cleared away the wreckage, 
readjusted the pipe and slaked the thirst 
of horse and man. 


That is for me a good symbol of the 
[151] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


results which follow so often on the ac- 
cidents of life. When a man’s wife, 
with whom he has lived in peace and 
joy for twenty years, is torn out of this 
world by an agonizing illness, through 
which he has nursed her, he would be 
less than human —a mere brute —if he 
were not shaken to the core. There 
will be months during which his world 
seems shattered and he will long for 
death. The falling tree has crushed 
him. But he is not dead and if he has 
within him the spring of faith in God, 
his life-long habit of worship wil ulti- 
mately repair the damage and he will 
proceed to serve and thank his God. 


[ 152] 


CHAPTER VIII 
THE BATTLE OF FAITH 


I 

When I was young I used to suppose 
that faith in God was like red hair, you 
either had it or you didn’t have it. I 
didn’t have it, but now that I have, I 
find that the thing is not so simple. 
Like everything worth having you must 
fight to keep it. At least that is the case 
with me. By the grace of God I have 
been given faith, but to retain and enlarge 
it I must fight the fiercest of all wars, a 
civil war, to which there seems no end, 
against my blindness and my folly. In 
that battle between body and soul — 
between the temptations of the carnal 
man and the will to serve God, I have 
gained some experience in regard to 


[ 153 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


weapons and the tactics of the enemy 
which may be of value to others. 

The prize fighter goes into the ring 
stripped to the buff — the rescuer leaping 
from the wharf to save a drowning man 
stops long enough to throw off coat and 
boots —the explorer battling with the 
barren north lightens his equipment to 
the limit —all men, in fact, who know 
their business, go out to fight the forces 
of nature in light marching order. I 
ask you to recall how in describing the 
adventures of the northern explorer, I 
noted the fact that his equipment was 
expensive and heavy. Bought ready 
made from Abercombie and Fitch, it 
contained among other things heavy 
rifles worth $50.00 apiece, which were 
of no use to him, because there was no 
game in that country on which they 
could be used. A single barreled 20-bore 


shotgun at a cost of $10.00, and 100 feet 
[ 154 ] 


THE BATTLE OF FAITH 


of gill net procurable at any Hudson 
Bay Company post for $2.00, would have 
been worth more to him than all his other 
baggage, for they would have enabled 
him to live on the country, and thus to 
save his life. But he didn’t have them. 
When he left the shore he took along 
food enough to have lasted an Indian 
family all winter. But he had to throw 
much of it away because of its weight, 
and he starved to death. 

Many years ago I learned by bitter 
experience not to load myself down with 
heavy baggage but to use the lightest 
possible equipment and the least amount 
of it. The lighter you travel the safer 
you are. 

And this is true, I think, not only of 
camping outfits, but also of religious 
creeds. Creeds are intellectual structures 
built by men, in which to house their faith. 
Until you have a faith to house you need 


[155] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


no creed. You can get a ready-made 
creed from the people who supply them, 
just as the explorer got ready-made 
equipment. You may find yourself, 
however, in the same dilemma that he 
was, with a creed too heavy for your 
faith or unsuited to the spiritual regions 
in which you want to travel. So I say 
again, travel light. But do not jump to 
the conclusion that I advise you to dis- 
card creeds or that I think men can 
get along without them. ‘They can’t. 
Creeds are necessary religious equip- 
ment. But they must be selected 
and designed with clear vision of the 
spiritual country in which they are to 
be used. and the spiritual strength of 
the explorer. 

Amid the controversies which rage 
around the creeds and which have driven 
many out of the Churches, we may easily 
fall into the error of supposing that the 


[ 156 J 


THE BATTLE OF FAITH 


average man does not feel the need of 
them. But that is not the fact. The 
most familiar accusation of the man in 
the street against the minister is that he 
is unpractical, and when you come to 
analyze that charge you find that what 
he objects to is not that the minister has 
too much creed but too little. All business 
men live by a creed; they could not do 
business without one, and there are few 
remarks more common among them than 
the saying, “I haven’t many principles 
but what I have I stick to.” Their whole 
method of business is controlled by creed; 
the time-honored “customs of the trade,” 
which represent the distilled experience 
of generations in adjusting theory to 
practice. 

When they say ministers are unprac- 
tical or ignorant of life, they mean that 
these men’s creeds are vague or that they 


don’t put them to practical use. And 
[ 157 J] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


the charge may be warranted, for creeds 
are the rules for applying faith to life, 
the efforts of men whose business it is to 
teach the relation of the soul to God, 
to rationalize, explain and apply to the 
daily life of man the great central truths 
of life itself. If the common man finds 
the creeds of the church incredible, and 
the ministers themselves fighting about 
what they mean, he is hardly to blame 
if he discards them and calls the ministers 
impractical dreamers. Frequently he 
finds that the minister who sets up to 
sell him religious faith lives in a world of 
fancy which has little or nothing to do 
with life. He won’t buy the goods be- 
cause he can’t use them. The tools and 
weapons offered him to fight the battle 
of faith are unsuited to his use and so he 
doesn’t use them. The dilemma is a 
real one to which I can offer no patent 


remedy. My suggestion is that each 
[ 158 7] 


THE BATTLE OF FAITH 


man must explore the spiritual world 
for himself, taking as his guide the 
best spiritual advisor available, and, 
starting with light equipment, modify, 
abandon or enlarge it from time to 
time as he discovers his personal powers 
and needs. He and his guide must work 
together, each learning what the other 
can teach—the minister learning prac- 
tical life and the business. man_ spirit- 
ual life. This is the way the great 
explorers have won success — the man of 
trained mind learning the lore of na- 
ture from the savage and the savage 
learning the use of the compass, for ex- 
ample, from the scientist. 

To put my suggestion in a sentence, 
don’t swallow your creed whole, for 
it may disagree with you. Eat a little 
of it at a time and live mostly on the 
country as the Indians do. Thus you 


will be able to fight for your faith with 
[ 159 | 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


both hands free instead of with a bundle 
under each arm. | 

Lest you should suppose that this is 
the idea of a modern skeptic I refer 
you to the Epistle to the Romans, III, 
V, X, passim. “‘Now I would not have 
you ignorant that apart from the cere- 
monies of the law, there hath been mani- 
fest a righteousness of God, being wit- 
nessed by the law and the prophets; 
even the righteousness through faith, as 
it is written, The just shall live by faith.” 
This was, perhaps, the most vital prin- 
ciple of Christ’s teaching, that faith 
must come before creed and be used to 
vitalize it. The Pharisees were those 
who sought to live by the law unlighted 
by faith and Christ called them hypo- 
crites. But He was not against the 
law. He upheld it. We must have 
both faith and creed, but faith must 
be first and must dominate. 


[ 160 7 


THE BATTLE OF FAITH 
Il 


Permit me a short digression in which 
to tell you something of a particular 
one of my own battles of faith. 

It took hard knocks to teach me 
that I must subordinate my will to the 
will of God. That it was so hard for 
me to learn was due in part, I think, 
to the fear that such a surrender would 
take away free will and lead to fatalism, 
which I abhor. My fear seemed jus- 
tifiable; for how could I surrender my 
will to God and also keep it free? If 
God knows and rules all things where 
does the will of man get its exercise; 
how save it from degeneration in such 
a sedentary scheme? Now I am neither 
theologian nor philosopher enough to 
attempt to set forth for you the ar- 
guments upon this subject, and it is 
quite unnecessary, for some of the great- 
est minds in the world have set them- 


[1617 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


selves to the task, with what success 
you can easily discover. All that I 
mean to attempt is to trace, if I can, 
the way in which my experience solved 
the riddle for itself. 

In the natural world men claim to 
have discovered a law which they call 
evolution, by which all living things 
are controlled. The plants and the ani- 
mals that have survived under the op- 
eration of this law are those which 
have obeyed the eternal, universal law. 
The. disobedient. have been  annihi- 
lated. These have no conscious choice 
but’ man has a choice. He has the 
freedom to choose between obedience 
to the universal law and _ disobedi- 
ence. If he choose obedience he does 
nothing more than the prosperous 
member of the animal or vegetable 
-world. But he can choose to dis- 
obey, and in my previous chapters I 


[ 162 | 


THE BATTLE OF FAITH 


have tried to show what will be the 
result. 

If he have faith in God and the cour- 
age to throw himself upon it and leap 
into the unknown he will find to his 
amazement that his will is more free 
than before; that he can use it with 
more scope and power than before he 
gave it up. The surrender of his liberty 
has made him free. 

Here are some of the ways he can 
exercise his will. There are occasions 
when he must use all the will power 
he has in clinging fiercely to his faith 
when one of the storms of life has wrecked 
his ship and washed him overboard. To 
cling to that seemingly unsubstantial 
raft will exhaust his muscles and throw 
him back upon his nerves. But when 
once he has passed through that ex- 
perience and come safe to the shore, 
it will have no more terrors for him. 


[ 163 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


These are the great crises of life when 
the will is strained to the breaking point, 
but there are strains in every day life 
which are even more wearing because 
more subtle. Faith should abolish anx- 
iety and fear but these are such in- 
sidious enemies that when the body is 
fatigued, we fall an easy prey to them 
and a mighty effort of the will is de- 
manded to throw them off. It must 
be done or they will eat into the heart 
of faith. 

Another demand upon the will is in 
the practice of prayer. No faith can 
live without this food, administered 
daily and even hourly. The supply 
of spiritual food must be constant in 
order that the man may vitalize every 
act of the day with the will of God, 
his master. But it requires great will 
power to maintain the perfect disci- 


pline of worship in the whirl and hurry 
[ 164 7] 


THE BATTLE OF FAITH 


of modern life. Nothing is easier than 
to allow this necessary practice to be 
pushed aside by the petty, but insist- 
ent, demands of a busy day. While 
nothing is more indispensable than the 
power which prayer alone can give, few 
things are easier than to forget it. Prayer 
is the only daily duty which the good 
servant must never shirk; but most 
of us shirk it often. If you find that 
the discipline of prayer does not re- 
quire all the will power you have to 
spare you are a saint indeed. 

The man who drinks deeply of the 
wine of faith must beware lest it go to 
his head, for it is a heady nectar which 
may carry him off into a world of fancy 
from which the hard facts of the ma- 
terial world are dimly seen. But as 
the great majority of God’s servants 
must serve Him daily in the world of 
fact, the man who loses his hold on 


[ 165 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


fact is an unfaithful servant. Nothing 
is easier than to allow faith to degene- 
rate into fancy so that hard facts be- 
come soft and the man falls into loose 
thinking and quackery. Patient ve- 
racity, tireless effort to codrdinate fact 
with faith, the use of reason and method 
to the limit of their legitimate scope, 
never to guess or to rely on faith when 
facts are available—such habits of daily 
life give a man’s will exercise enough 
to keep it in hard condition. 

These few suggestions may well prove 
sufficient to quiet your fear lest in 
surrendering to the will of God you 
should lack opportunity for the exer- 
cise of free will. But there are many 
more. They are perhaps innumerable, 
and I shall only give one more example 
which is, however, the best of all for me. 
Each faithful follower of Jesus must 
take up his cross and follow Him. He 


C 166 7] 


THE BATTLE OF FAITH 


must be willing —nay, eager —to suffer 
for his faith, to face ridicule among 
other things for’ the Master’s sake. 
That is one of the hardest things for 
me — to make myself ridiculous for my 
faith, — but it is one of the most neces- 
sary. 

As.is my habit, I shall put this ex- 
ample in the form of a parable. Years 
ago at Christmas time I received, 
among other presents (from people 
whose friendship for me was stronger 
than their knowledge of my character) a 
couple of potted plants. One was what 
I call ““Wandering Jew,” from igno- 
rance of its true name, and the other a 
little rose bush. I have no knowledge 
of flower growing and very little knack 
with plants. But I like them and so, 
as I was away from the house all day, 
and often for days at a time, and could 
not look after them myself, I gave 


[ 167 ] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


them in charge of the parlor maid and 
directed her to water them and keep 
them as much as possible in the sun. 
This she did after the manner of par- 
lor maids, that 1s, whenever she thought 
of it. 

The Wandering Jew is a foliage plant 
of incredible toughness, which no 
amount of neglect will kill, and so it 
throve well under this treatment. But 
roses are delicate, sensitive things. 
Mine languished; the flowers died, no 
new buds appeared, and it fairly crawled 
with green aphis. Obviously, it was 
in process of death from neglect. I 
sprayed it once in a while with soap 
or tobacco extract, but without much 
effect. It needed something more. And 
then by chance a German professor 
with an Austrian wife came to visit 
me. The professor was a high expert 
in City Planning and immensely pre- 


[ 168 J 


THE BATTLE OF FAITH 


occupied with turning his ideas into 
bricks and mortar, while I was pre- 
occupied with my efforts to turn my 
ideas into dollars or dams or power 
houses. We were both fatuously busy 
fussing about our little hopes and fears. 

But the Austrian lady was of an- 
other type; calm, mystical, unworldly, 
impractical, but strangely winning. She 
noticed at once my poor little rose 
plant, remarked that it was dying and 
asked if she might take care of it. 

Of course she might! Nothing would 
please me more than to have some one 
else do it, provided they did not bother 
me. And so she took it over and liter- 
ally seemed to pray over it. Morning, 
noon and night she was forever fussing 
over it, often in quite ridiculous ways, 
while her husband and I jeered at her. 
She would kneel down by it, pat it, 


handle the leaves and smell it; and all 
[169 7 


EXCEPT YE BE. BORN AGAIN 


of a sudden it began to thrive. The 
leaves changed their color from the 
yellowish tinge portending death to a 
darker green; the aphis vanished; buds 
appeared and later flowers. She had 
literally loved and tended the thing 
back to life. ‘Truly seen, a most beau- 
tiful, miraculous and sacred act of the 
deepest significance, but one which 
neither I (nor, I think, the bustling 
German professor) took any notice of at 
the time. 

Quite recently, walking in the wind 
and snow beside the Connecticut River, 
the picture of that lady loving her 
rose bush came back to me, as clear 
as if it were yesterday instead of §fif- 
teen years ago. In fact, more clear — 
far more — than when I saw her with the 
eye of the flesh, and I saw the true mean- 
ing of that parable. The rose plant 
was the symbol of a young and ten- 


[170] 


THE BATTLE OF FAITH 


der faith in God which my brutal neg- 
ligence had all but killed when the Lord 
sent down his angel to save it from me. 
She did it, but it was her soul and not 
mine that reaped the reward. She had 
the courage to brave ridicule for her 
faith. 

It is the sort of courage that we all 
need, the courage to brave the laughter 
and scorn of others, just as that Aus- 
trian lady did for her rose. Especially 
when you are young that is a hard thing 
to do. You fear the laughter of your 
contemporaries. It takes rare courage 
to face it. 

But such courage is the highest courage 
in the world, and the most necessary. 
It was one of the most significant char- 
acteristics of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
He showed it again and again. “Son, 
why hast thou so dealt with us?” 


“Wist ye not that I must be about my 
ivi a 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


Father’s business?”? “Is not this the 
carpenter’s son?” “Can any good 
thing come out of Nazareth?” “Jesus 
of Nazareth, the King of the Jews!” 
“Jews, behold your King.” If you 
can make the scenes in which these 
things were said perfectly vivid to 
yourselves you will have seen a truly 
miraculous thing; a courage beyond 
all other recorded courage; the courage 
of a King to make himself ridiculous. 
Think of that, and it will not be so 
hard for you to make yourselves a 
little ridiculous in the service of your 
faith. 

But do not think to escape ridicule. 
You can never do that and save your 
soul alive. “Take up your cross and 
follow me.”? What do you think that 
means? It means that your faith in 
God must be sturdy enough to with- 


stand suffering; that you must be able 
[1727] 


THE BATTLE OF FAITH 


and willing to make sacrifices for your 
faith and to face ridicule. 

This is an example of the sort of thing 
you may have to do. For worship and 
prayer you will need a sanctuary, a 
place hallowed by usage and so tuned 
to your mood that it will help you in 
the difficult art or business of praying. 
And you need such a place not only to 
pray in but to think in; a place where you 
can go daily to arrange your thoughts, 
to get your head in tune with your 
heart and soul. If you are like me, 
you will not find such a place in any 
of our Protestant churches. Most of 
them are closed when you want to use 
them, and if you find one that is open 
the sexton and the spiders will scare 
you away. You will have to make such 
a place for yourselves, and you can if 
you are not afraid of ridicule. What- 
ever your housing arrangements may 


[173] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


be, a place can be made for it in your 
home. “Go into your closet and there 
pray.” That’s not a joke. A good 
sized closet will do very well; a candle, 
a crucifix and a trunk for an altar, 
and there you are. You will have no 
troubles except one; the worst trouble 
in the world —the fear of ridicule. What 
will husband, father, brother, sister, 
or child think of it? Most probably 
they will laugh at you, or still worse, 
they will be shocked (or think they 
ought to be shocked) and will mur- 
mur something about‘ ‘Catholic ritual- 
ism.” That will be hard for you to 
face, but you must face it, or turn 
away at your peril. 

But before you give it up, face the 
risks involved. Just ask yourselves 
this question. Which is the greater, 
your fear of your family and friends 
or your fear of God? There is only one 


[1747] 


THE BATTEL OF FAITH 


answer to the question put in that way. 
So set your teeth, put your will into ° 
it, and “‘face the music.”’ 

The serious minded reader, if I am 
so fortunate as to have one whose 
patience has lasted to this point, may 
be tempted to throw his book down in 
despair, feeling that instead of de- 
scribing the stubborn battle to hold 
and expand the empire of faith, I have 
wandered off into a semi-philosophical 
discussion of dogma and free will. But 
let me recapitulate. I began by sug- 
gesting that in arming for the contest 
we do well to start light and alter our 
equipment as experience dictates and 
I then described the enemies to be en- 
countered, the five devils of disaster, 
fear, sloth, vagueness and_ ridicule. 
They are wary adversaries, whose con- 
certed attack,—one down and another 
come on—requires a sleepless vigilance 


[175 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


which will try the temper of your steel, 
and if you find that this is not a fierce 
and life-long battle, you are more for- 
tunate than I. 


[ 176 J 


CHAPTER IX 
MIRACLES AND MYTHS 


An opinion may be commonplace with- 
out being insignificant, for the com- 
monest things are the most important, 
and so I face the risk of boring you 
while I record the fact that the Bible 
has now become for me the most in- 
dispensable text-book in the _ world. 
There are doubtless several hundred 
thousand others of whom it is equally 
true that this is the only book which 
will always meet their need. There 
is no mood of spiritual elation to which 
men or nature can raise them, and none 
of spiritual abasement to which their 
sins can force them down, which does 
not find there some passage akin to 
itself which will help to turn elation 


C1777] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


into useful action, or to take the bitter- 
ness out of repentance. But it is not 
an easy book to read with understand- 
ing, for only after years of patient 
study, if ever, can its full significance 
be grasped. Much of the Old Testa- 
ment, for example, is even now, al- 
most meaningless to me because I am 
still ignorant of its historical setting. 
Owing to the fact that even at the date 
of the latest Gospels the art of writing 
was still little practised, I do not doubt 
that all but Christ’s most vital say- 
ings have been lost to us, and I find 
that such as we have are in a form so 
concentrated that however often I read 
them I always find new and _ illumi- 
nating truths. The natural conse- 
quence of such verbal compactness is 
that only those who bring to the study 
of these Books a burning faith and 
great earnestness of purpose, can hope 


[1738 7] 


MIRACLES AND MYTHS 


to extract their full value as spiritual 
food, and it does not, therefore, sur- 
prise me that until after my conver- 
sion the Bible was to me a closed book. 
A skeptical youth born in an age of 
scientific criticism is bound to find many 
obstacles in his path. 

In the good old times, I. am credi- 
bly informed that men accepted the 
“King James Version” of the Bible 
verbatim as literally true from cover 
to cover, but during the last fifty years 
the critics and the scientists have made 
this very difficult, for the critics have 
discovered many omissions and _ inac- 
curacies in the text, and the scientists 
many apparent statements of fact which 
are not true. The great Huxley, for 
example, was able to satisfy himself 
that the history of the creation con- 
tained in Genesis was grossly inaccu- 
rate and that many other portions of 


[179 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


the Old Testament could only be re- 
garded as mythology or even demon- 
ology. 

Taken as poetry and epic literature 
the average boy without much religious 
sentiment might well prefer Homer and 
the Greek tragedians. It was so with 
me, and I do not think we can expect 
young people, educated as they now 
are, to bring to the study of the Bible 
such powers of imagination and reli- 
gious insight as will enable them to 
disentangle parables from statements 
of fact or to grasp the complicated sym- 
bolism of this greatest of all works of 
literary art. For the result of our 
methods of teaching is such that our 
children accept as gospel truth the 
statements of immature teachers about 
such obscure phenomena as the struc- 
ture of matter or the nature of electri- 


cal energy, while they regard the teach- 
C180 7] 


MIRACLES AND MYTHS 


ings of the sacred Gospels as fairy 
tales or worn-out myths. There are few 
fathers I fancy who have not heard 
their sons parade with confidence sci- 
entific conclusions about which the most 
eminent experts would say they were 
in doubt; for it seems that our young 
folk will reject many of the miracles 
in the Bible as unworthy of their in- 
telligence, while they swallow whole 
the miracles of light, heat and sound, 
among which we pass our nights. But 
this does not alarm or even surprise 
me. I behaved so myself, and perhaps 
our hope of a brighter future may lie 
in this very fact, for we live in an age 
of miracles so to speak. The amaz- 
ing discoveries of modern science have 
made many of the miracles of yesterday 
the common habits of today. Our im- 
aginations have been so stimulated and 
the war has brought us so much suffer- 


[ 181 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


ing that we may well have arrived at 
the point where we can read our Bible 
with a new vision and draw from it 
the spiritual power which we must have 
to save our tottering institutions and 
even our civilization itself. 

I do not think I was exceptiona] when 
as a boy I regarded miracles as cata- 
strophic examples of the willfulness of 
the Almighty, breaking his own law 
for his own satisfaction and this nat- 
urally made me feel that the miracles 
in the Bible not only did not add to its 
authority but served to destroy it. The 
nineteenth century was too critical and 
scientific-minded to be imposed upon 
in that way. But the most recent dis- 
coveries of science have forced us to 
modify this view, for we now live in 
daily company with forces the nature 
of which we do not know. Miracles — 
that is, effects, the cause of which is 


[ 182 7] 


MIRACLES AND MYTHS 


obscure to us — are the commonest things, 
in life, and so I, at least, have been 
forced to adopt a wholly different at- 
titude of mind. Instead of being shocked 
or confused by many of the miracles 
in the Bible, my center of gravity has 
moved so far that I am more in dan- 
ger of thinking them unimportant. In 
this I find support in many sayings of 
Jesus which seem to indicate that he 
felt the danger of exaggerating the sig- 
nificance of his miracles of healing. 

The result of this change of attitude 
toward the stories and the miracles in 
the Bible has been such a blessing to 
me that I want to illustrate it specifi- 
cally and so I give here one or two ex- 
amples of what my recent studies of 
the Bible have brought me. 

At the outset I must confess that owing 
to my ignorance of the design of the temple 
upon the walls of which the great frescoes 


[ 183 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


of the Old Testament are painted, large 
sections of it are still very obscure to 
me, but I venture to assert that if the 
greatest artist of our day should under- 
take to describe the spiritual experi- 
ences of a man who, beaten down by 
the accidents of this life, was tempted 
to criticize the wisdom of the Almighty, 
he would pitch his manuscript into 
the fireplace after re-reading the Book of 
Job. That Book seems to me to fill 
the space so full that there is no room 
for another. The subject has been ex- 
hausted and we have been filled. 

When I was young many of the sto- 
ries of the New Testament seemed to me 
mere mythology or fairy tales which I 
had outgrown. Their true mystic value 
was beyond my comprehension, for my 
intellect was not then illuminated by 
faith. 


As an example of what I mean, I 


[184 7] 


MIRACLES AND MYTHS 


select at random the story of the Star 
of Bethlehem, which I regarded as mere 
feminine sentimentality. I did not be- 
lieve the story as a statement of fact 
and it never occurred to me that it 
might be a parable, so that until a very 
recent date I completely missed its 
beauty and power. But I have now 
come to see in it a marvelously vivid 
description of exactly what occurs to 
all twice born men. The “spiritual 
revolution’’ of conversion has been well 
described as a turning round of the 
man so that he faces God, and I find 
it literally true that like the shepherds 
of old each man turns round some night 
and sees in the East a great star which 
he follows to his Bethlehem where he 
does actually find the young child of 
his new faith just born in a humble 
place. Every word of the Bible story 
fits into my own experience, and I have 


[ 185 |] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


come to see in it not an incredible fairy 
tale, but a masterly description of one 
of the commonest experiences of life. 
It is not a myth to amuse the children, 
but a mirror held up to men in which 
they see their own lives more clearly 
than ever before. To me this legend 
is now a priceless link connecting me 
into the endless chain of an immortal 
past, present and future life. 

As an example of a miracle which 
I could not swallow, take the story of 
the Virgin Birth of Jesus. Read as 
a statement of literal fact regarding 
the material body of the man Jesus, it 
was repulsive and incredible; I could 
not possibly accept it in that form and 
no alternative was suggested. Now, 
however, I see it in a new light, which 
I offer very humbly because of my 
blunders in the past and because I 
recognize the fact that there are many 


[ 186 7] 


MIRACLES AND MYTHS 


wiser than I who take a wholly differ- 
ent view. With these I have no quar- 
rel. If you can believe in the virgin 
birth of Christ’s physical body by all 
means do so; but if you cannot, con- 
sider this view of it: 

What is the vital essence, or true 
reality of a man? 

I hear of men of science who solemnly 
affirm that the decaying carnal sheath 
in which we live for a day is the man 
himself. But to me it is incredible 
that so temporary and feeble a thing 
can be the end and purpose of creation. 
I hold that the real man is not his body 
but his soul,—his spiritual body which 
lived before and will outlive its cover- 
ing. Taken with the fact that all men 
except Jesus must be born again of the 
spirit before they can enter the King- 
dom of Heaven, I conclude that this 


second birth is the true birth of every 
[ 187 |] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


man, the birth of the spirit— an im- 
maculate conception — which is a mira- 
cle by the grace of God. The soul, or 
real spiritual body of every man is 
and must be of virgin birth, otherwise 
we are never truly born. But our 
Master Jesus was not a twice born 
man, for from the day of the birth of 
his body he lived in the world of the 
spirit with God in Heaven. On that 
day he was in literal fact immacu- 
lately conceived of the spirit, and I 
now find nothing in any version of the 
story of His birth which I have read 
which I cannot absolutely believe. I 
do believe it and I find the accounts 
in the Gospels quite in harmony with 
the law of the scientific and spiritual 
world. On this question which is now 
so hotly debated that an explosion in 
the Churches is threatened, I find my- 


self today in the comforting (though 
[ 188 7] 


MIRACLES AND MYTHS 


anomalous) position of believing that 
there is nothing to quarrel about. 
Though a liberal of the liberals, I can 
lie down with the fiercest fundamen- 
talist in the calm conviction that he 
will not, (in fact cannot,) bite me, for 
he has no teeth. | 

These are two examples of how faith 
and a more modern view of miracles 
have changed large portions of my Bible 
from wearisome or incredible mythology 
to lessons in the theory and practice of 
daily life. 


[189 *] 


CHAPTER X 
EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


I have been amazed and humiliated 
to find when men ask me, as they often 
do, how faith in God may be obtained, 
that the question irritated and alarmed 
me. What inquiry could be more natu- 
ral, more important, or simpler for the 
man of faith to answer, and why should 
I be irritated? It is a point over which 
I have puzzled long, bearing in mind my 
experience that when an assertion angers 
me, it is commonly because I am in the 
wrong, and when a question irritates 
me, it is because I ought to know the 
answer, but don’t. I now conclude 
that I am irritated because the ques- 
tion startles me. It comes at me from 
an unexpected quarter. The form and 


[ 190 ] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


not the substance of the question is 
what disturbs me, because it seems to 
assume that faith can be picked up 
like a house and lot, or like a knowl- 
edge of chemistry; that there must 
somewhere be a man who can {furnish 
it to you ready made. This to my 
mind is a dangerous mistake which 
is partly responsible for the destruc- 
tive confusion between faith and creeds, 
the assumption being that there is some 
patent medicine or other device which 
will cure all spiritual ills, like the “‘Mor- 
rison’s pill’’ to which Carlyle so aptly 
refers. 

There is none; that. box is empty. 
No man can give you faith, or teach 
it to you. My stubborn (perhaps stu- 
pid) insistence on this point, has sad- 
dened the hearts of my friends, I fear, 
for they feel that it amounts to de- 
nying the power and value of all re- 


[191] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


ligious education. To that point I do 
not go, but I do contend that faith can- 
not be taught, but only the forms of wor- 


ship — the Gospels, rituals and creeds. 
Faith is a free gift from God to all who 


ask it. ‘“‘Seek and ye shall find”; but 
you must be in earnest about it. “You 
can lead a horse to water, but you can’t 
make him drink.” God will give faith 
to all who seek it, but He cannot give 
it to those who do not. And if God 
can’t give faith except to the urgent 
searcher, can men do more? No, I 
repeat, men cannot give you faith, only 
God. 

But men can teach you the forms 
of worship developed by the age-long 
experience of mankind. Coming after 
faith, these are the tools and the skill 
you need, but if they come before faith 
or remain after it has vanished, they 
are useless or even worse. 


[ 192 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


You must earn your faith for your- 
self by intense labor and anguish of 
the spirit. In his essay on Compen- 
sation, Emerson declares that all things 
in this world must be paid for and al- 
though he excepts the soul, describing 
it as not a compensation but a life, I 
feel sure that he would have agreed 
that you must work for faith. 

Jesus said, ““Seek and ye shall find; 
knock and it shall be opened unto you.” 
You must seek and you must knock, 
but do not seek from men. Faith comes 
by the grace of God. “Ye must be 
born again of the spirit” which comes 
from God alone. You must labor and 
search for it, but when it comes it will 
flourish amazingly like the grain of 
mustard seed. 

Conversion is the gift of God to those 
who pray to and serve Him. It cannot, 


I think, be produced by any method 
[193 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


of education. No priest can plant the 
seed. But there is virtue in religious 
environment and religious education. 
The hen does not create the chick— 
birth 1s a miracle of God — but she can 
keep the eggs warm and after the chick 
is hatched, she can feed and teach it. 
So it is with faith. Man cannot pro- 
duce it, but he can provide a warm re- 
ligious atmosphere favorable for its 
growth, and when the young faith is 
born, man can protect, inspire and en- 
large it. 

And so I conclude that the answer to 
the question, ““How do you get faith?”’ 
is; Pray for it to God; feel the need 
of it so intensely that the desire domi- 
nates your life, and God will give it. 
You will be born again. Ask of men — 
your earthly fathers — the gifts that they 
can give. But faith is not the child 


of man, but the child of God — for that 
T1947] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


you must ask your heavenly father. 
When the gift has come down to you 
from Heaven and lives upon the earth, 
the earth can feed it and it will grow; 
every instant of life will feed and clothe 
it. Men will crowd about you to share 
the riches of your faith, and the more 
you give away, the more you have left. 
This is how Jesus fed the multitude 
on five loaves and two small fishes 
and had more left afterwards than when — 
he began. 

To the scribes and pharisees, Jesus 
offered the gift of faith but they were 
-carnal men who refused it because it 
was beyond their imaginative power. 
“How can a man be born again when 
he is old?” Our world today is full 
of just such men. 

Jesus went up to Jerusalem and of- 
fered to the whole people of Israel 
the miracle of conversion and the King- 


[ 195 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


dom of Heaven, and when they spurned 
it, He went up to Golgotha, ascended 
the highest and most powerful wire- 
less sending tower ever built and dis- 
charged therefrom his message at such 
high potential, that it not only carried 
clean round the earth, but has con- 
tinued to circle it for two thousand 
years. 


[ 196 7] 


CHAPTER XI 
THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX 


Science vs. Religion 


The Protestant Churches are rent to- 
day by the struggle between the Fun- 
damentalists and the Liberals, the bone 
of contention being how to harmonize 
the findings of modern science with 
the theory and practice of traditional 
Christianity. The leaders of the battle 
are mostly clergymen who seem to re- 
gard with coldness the venturesome lay- 
man desiring to take a hand; who de- 
clare in effect that they are the chosen 
champions of faith and that they should 
be left undisturbed to fight it out. 
But I would remind them that the 
Churches are built for the worshipers 


and not for the priests and that it is 
[ 197 J 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


as much the duty of the layman as of 
his minister to face and to answer this 
question. It is vital to every one of 
us and for that reason, I make bold 
to suggest some considerations upon 
the subject. | 

I feel safe in assuming that Faith 
in God, or the religious instinct, is 
a natural possession of the normal child, 
but I think it may be no exaggeration 
to say that, before they are twenty, 
most men have lost it. This is a mere 
guess on my part, but whatever the 
proportion may be, it is undeniable 
that there are multitudes in our world 
today whose faith has vanished. Some 
have lost faith by starvation, and others 
by the accidents of life, such as disease, 
loss of property or loss of friends; some 
have wantonly murdered it by a sin- 
ful life, but from the great majority 


it has been filched, or stolen, away by 
[198 7] 


THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX 


the skepticism of the period, a skep- 
ticism which is produced by reason 
misapplied and by a false conception 
and misuse of the scientific or logical 
method of thought. It is to this class 
—those who have drifted into skep- 
ticism as a result of their liberal cul- 
ture—that I want to direct attention 
particularly. At skepticism—the child 
of reason—I have often before fired 
a shot, but now I want to concentrate 
my whole fire upon it and to light up 
as vividly as possible the hard-fought 
battle between Faith and Reason. Fail- 
ure to grasp the fact and the true mean- 
ing of this struggle appears to me to 
have plunged more souls into a Hell 
on earth than all the other forces com- 
bined. 

Faith in God, I hold to be the source 
of all human power; it arises from our 
feeling of weakness which makes us 


[199 7] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


long that there should be a God and 
leads us to find Him. It wells up out 
of the heart and is sustained by the 
will —for once man has felt the power 
which faith can give and has recog- 
nized that life is impossible without 
faith —he will never let it go. But 
mark this well, for it is vital: Faith 
comes from the heart; it is a feeling — 
an emotion—which man has exhibited 
from the dawn of history and to which 
he clings with an unreasoning (in fact 
an unreasonable) but desperate grasp. 
His feeling of God and of Immortality 
is one which he cannot completely ex- 
plain by any logical process — which he 
cannot clearly rationalize. He knows 
instinctively that it is essential, but 
he cannot tell you why. Faith is his 
life force — his will to live—the spark 
of life; the power that drives him 
on, but it is nonrational. He cannot 


C 200 7] 


THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX 


produce it by a _ purely intellectual 
method. 

And now upon the other side comes 
Reason, likewise a thing essential to 
the life of man. It is the quality which 
has differentiated him from the brutes; 
the power which in the struggle for sur- 
vival has given him the victory. It 
is his conscious intellect and reasoning 
faculty which has made it possible for 
him to fight his way up through the 
centuries to the mastery of nature which 
he now enjoys. Reason — intellect — 
memory applied to the phenomena of 
nature have made him what he is and 
have put beyond assignable limits the 
height of knowledge and power to which 
he may rise. 

And so, I repeat, reason is essential 
to the preservation of life. But once 
let it come to grips with faith — lhke- 
wise an essential thing—and it seems 


[ 201 | 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


that either reason or faith must die; 
that one must kill the other. IJt seems 
like an irrepressible conflict and, in 
fact, 7t is. If you apply the reasoning 
methods of science to your faith in 
God, you kill it. Science deals with 
demonstration, with measurement, with 
mathematical proof. The trade-mark 
of the scientist is skepticism. Nothing 
can be accepted until proved; what 
cannot be proved cannot be known; 
what cannot be demonstrated is not 
true. And so the scientist faced with 
the question of the nature of God and 
of the soul can only shake his head and 
say, “It cannot be proved; as a man 
of science I cannot affirm these truths. 
So far as my knowledge goes the soul 
is a function of the mind; the mind 
is part of the body; when the body 
dies the soul dies too. In science there 
is no immortal soul.” 


[ 202 || 


THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX 


And now if you turn to the philos- 
opher and ask him about God and the 
soul he must apply the reasoning method 
also; he must reason from the demon- 
strable facts of the material. world and 
by deduction and definition work out 
for you a theory of the life of man. 
By this method he will reach the con- 
clusion that the group of phenomena 
which he observes must have had a 
beginning or First Cause, and by dint of 
patient labor he will ultimately produce 
and display with triumph an idea of God. 

But such a thing is of small service 
to the man groping towards faith who 
demands an explanation of the living 
God whom he feels within him as the 
vitalizing principle of his life. The 
philosopher must perforce proceed by 
definition and dissection. But you can- 
not dissect a thing until it is dead and 
you cannot define it until it has ceased 


[ 203 |] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


to change, which also implies that it is 
dead. And so the philosopher can- 
not help you in your search more than 
the scientist; the one says he cannot 
know a living God, and the other hands 
you a dead one. 

With the psychologist or the psycho- 
analyst I sometimes find myself a little 
irritated because they try to apply the 
method of vivisection to the spiritual 
body. They seem to feel that they have 
succeeded in “beating the game,” so 
to speak, and are correspondingly pleased 
with themselves. But I must confess 
that in this matter my sympathies are 
with the common man when he catches 
these gentry fooling with his immortal 
soul. His instinct is to call for the po- 
lice. They might steal something. Vivi- 
section has achieved marvels in the 
world of science and in the service of 
man. The surgeon by vivisecting his 


[ 204 |] 


THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX 


guinea pig and sacrificing its life has 
saved the lives of men. The results 
justify him. Nay, I would go further 
and even sacrifice the lives of indi- 
vidual men in order to benefit the race. 
Such martyrdom is a proof of faith. 
But if, as the Master taught us, the life 
of God is the life of man, I dare not 
vivisect and kill my God, for if I do, I 
kill myself. 

And again, if you appeal to the theo- 
logian, you will fare no better, for he 
is the appointed servant of a Church — 
an institution —and so a bureaucrat by 
trade. . 

I readily admit the contention of 
the historian that an institution is a 
crystallized idea. There is certainly 
a sense in which that is true; but I would 
remind you that a crystal is a dead, 
not a living thing. At best it can trans- 


mit, but not produce light. 
[ 205 |] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


If the Church be such an institution, 
its servant the theologian, bound by his 
creeds, must follow the reasoning method. 
He may or may not transmit light but he 
can hardly produce it and give you 
life. These men, however, and their 
institutions, are of great service to us 
and one would remind the reformer — 
hammer in hand—who seeks to im- 
prove matters by shattering the crys- 
tal, that he cannot mend matters in 
this way. You may swallow the diamond 
whole without danger, but taken in 
pulverized form, it is more fatal than 
a poison. ‘Therefore, think twice be- 
fore you shatter the institution of a 
Church or any other ancient structure. 

This then is the conflict which the 
Spanish writer Unamuno calls the Tragic 
Sense of Life:— On the one side Reason, 
whose champions are the scientist, the 


philosopher and the theologian; and on 
[ 206 |] 


THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX 


the other Faith, the source of life, whose 
champion is the common man. It is 
the conflict of the intellect with the 
will to live; of the rational with the non- 
rational: of science with religion. 

And if, as is commonly assumed, it is 
a struggle in which one or the other 
party must die, the prophets of God 
might well be daunted by the forces 
arrayed against them. If it be true 
that we must sacrifice our reason to 
save our faith, or our faith to save our 
reason, science has indeed brought us 
to a desperate pass. But while it can- 
not be denied that multitudes have 
given up their faith for this. cause and 
that the churches are today tottering 
under the blows of those who will not 
abandon faith and therefore seek to 
beat your reason to death, I am bold 
enough to assert that the assumption 
is false. Both faith and reason can and 


[ 207 7 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


must live. This I hold to be proved by 
what I know of history. Man with 
his will to live has fought with nature 
from the beginning of time. Neither 
has destroyed the other. On the con- 
trary, his progress has been buzlt wpon 
this struggle and is in fact the result of 
it and I am firmly convinced that the 
struggle between science and religion 
is of exactly the same nature; perhaps 


even the same one. 
Man has always lived in the presence | 


of danger; one might almost say he has 
lived by it and on it. The sporting in- 
stinct, the love of risk and danger so 
deep bedded in mankind, is the proof 
of that. What is the sense of pleasure 
which strong men feel when they hear 
wild beasts in the woods about them 
but an ancient instinct of danger and 
joy of fighting danger? Perhaps it is 
no exaggeration to say that men cannot 


E 208 |] 


THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX 


live without struggle, for they fear noth- 
ing so much as monotony, and if this 
struggle between Science and Religion 
— between Reason and Faith — can be 
brought out into its true perspective 
it may prove to be the moral equiva- 
lent of war, for which that great teacher, 
William James, so eagerly sought. 

In attempting to relate the struggle 
of Science and Religion to that be- 
tween man and nature, I must warn 
you at the outset that I shall retire into 
the imaginative world; that is, into 
what I feel to be the real world—and 
I begin by suggesting to you an analogy 
which I have found helpful. We often 
fall into the confusion of thinking that 
pain and joy are opposing and strug- 
gling realities; that, as with Reason 
and Faith, one must be killed to save 
the other. But this is not true. Pain 
and joy are not opposing forces but 


[ 209 |] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


two aspects or attributes of one power; 
the power of growth. Pain does not 
kill happiness; it may even produce 
it, for pain is a sign of growth, and growth, 
being the purpose of life, produces har- 
mony—that is, happiness. 

I see pain as simply the protest of 
the structure strained to its limit. When 
the muscle in your arm has put forth 
all its strength it cries out with pain; 
when your spirit is stretched to the 
breaking point by your effort to see the 
face of God, it makes you suffer. But 
that is the path to the “life more abun- 
dant” which Jesus offered men. So 
many fear to accept the gift! Such 
strains make the muscle in your body 
or the imaginative power of your soul 
stronger. They are not things to be 
avoided but to be sought. 

Or we may conceive of pain as the 
inertia or resistance of the flesh to the 


[ 210 J 


THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX 


spirit. It is from the painful struggle 
for happiness that personality is born; 
and one may believe that it was in part 
to prove this that Jesus submitted to 
the agony in the garden and to death 
upon the cross. We see Him grow and 
expand His soul by this anguish merging 
into joy. It would have been easy for 
Him to have avoided this ordeal, but 
He repeatedly and sternly refused every 
way of escape. He knew that the soul 
could only flower through suffering and 
that only through a death of agony 
could He prove to men the truths which 
he had preached. 

And therefore, I say again that pain 
is not a thing to be avoided, but a thing 
to be sought in order that we may find 
happiness. The most awful anguish 
which I have ever suffered has in fact 
proved to be my greatest blessing. It 
is in these moments that I have learned 


[211] 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


the lessons of life; these are the days 
which I look back to and hug with joy. 
During the struggle the sense of pain is 
dominating, but afterwards we see that 
these days have been the gift of God; 
that these are the days for which we 
have prayed and that from them come 
such peace as we have earned. I find 
it to be literally true that we enjoy our 
pain and suffer our joy. Far from the 
struggle of these being a mortal one, it 
is the fountain of life and makes us feel 
that we are immortal. 

And so I think it is with science and 
faith. Faith must use science for the 
preservation of life; the instinct of sur- 
vival drives us to rationalize, to investi- 
gate and to master the material world. 
The growth of science is what makes 
for progress in the race. But what is 
it that vitalizes and moves to action 
the men of science; these alleged ene- 


[2127] 


THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX 


mies of faith? It is this feeling which 
they are supposed to be fighting 
against — namely, Faith. Science cannot 
live and work without faith; faith is 
the motive power which drives it on. 
The ambition of the scientific investi- 
gator comes from a conscious or sub- 
conscious faith. Taken at its lowest 
the scientist has faith in the Laws of 
the Universe which he has discovered; 
faith that the same cause will always 
produce the same effect; that the 
eclipse of the sun will come at the time 
predicted. Taken at its highest, the 
ambition of the scientist to extend hu- 
man knowledge comes from his feeling 
that he is immortal, that his soul is a 
part of the soul of the Universe, which 
is God’s consciousness, and from an 
intense longing to enlarge his soul or 
his share of God. The motive power 
of all the disciples of reason is the same — 


[ 213 7 


EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN 


that unreasonable, nonrational thing 
we call Faith, and so it seems to me that 
we can truly say that this alleged strug- 
gle between Science and Religion is 
necessary to our life and progress. It 
is not a struggle in which science must 
destroy religion or be destroyed by it, 
but a struggle like the passion of cre- 
ative love from which life is born. 


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